It can feel a little odd putting a price tag on a wild animal. An animal we have no means of communicating with – an animal that will never comprehend its own ‘naural capital’. Yet, whether we like it or not, on this planet we call home, money talks. And when conservation decisions are increasingly shaped by economics, putting a price tag on nature can become the determining factor in whether a species – and the habitats upon which it depends – is protected.

As Tony Juniper writes in What Has Nature Ever Done for Us?, “money really does grow on trees.”

In the case of manta rays, it seems that money grows in the plankton-rich tropical waters of the Maldives – an island nation made up of 99.9% water and home to the world’s largest population of reef manta rays.

“Investigating the economic value of manta ray tourism in the Maldives wasn’t my first goal when I got into manta ray research,” says Hannah Moloney, a PhD candidate at the University of the Sunshine Coast and Manta Feeding Ecology and Oceanography Specialist at the Manta Trust.

“I think it really came from seeing how rapidly manta tourism was growing in the Maldives and how many manta watching sites were becoming increasingly crowded. With that kind of tourism pressure, I started wondering what was at risk. What were we at risk of losing? That led to wanting to understand the value of these animals to local communities – not just in terms of financial benefits, but in other ways as well.”

That question became the foundation of a multi-year collaborative study. One of its most striking findings was that the Maldives’ population of approximately 3,500 manta rays is projected to generate an astonishing US$8.6 billion in tourism revenue over their lifetimes, with individual reef manta rays contributing as much as US$2.6 million through repeated tourism encounters.

At first glance, those figures seem almost unbelievable. How can one individual animal really be worth millions of dollars? And, looking at the bigger picture, do we even have the right to measure the worth of wildlife in monetary terms?

For many conservationists, reducing wildlife to a dollar value doesn’t sit comfortably. Nature has intrinsic value that exists regardless of whether it generates tourism income or economic growth. Manta rays are worth protecting because they are remarkable, cognitively complex creatures that have evolved over millions of years. Like every other species in our oceans, they have a part to play in the intricate web of life, and their future is inseparable from the health of the marine ecosystems they inhabit.