NationofChange How did the pandemic affect ocean conservation? Clickbait stories of happy animals returning to suddenly quiet habitats paint an overly rosy picture of COVID-19’s impact on the marine environment. As we enter what’s hopefully the home stretch of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s time to take stock of how it affected every aspect of our world, to consider what happened, what could be done differently to avoid those problems in the future, and what’s next. That might mean confronting some of our earlier conclusions. For example, at the start of the pandemic, we were bombarded with often false stories about suddenly quiet cities and waterways experiencing animals reclaiming what was once their habitat. “Nature is healing” stories like this seem to have created an overly rosy picture of the pandemic’s impact on the natural world.