Many social-ecological issues are characterised by a multiplicity of stakeholder voices with often fundamentally divergent values, beliefs or worldviews. Those differences in perspective can be also viewed as different narratives on individual, community and cultural scales that both express and reinforce people’s identity, value system and manifested behaviours. Navigating between those narratives requires approaches that facilitate the co-existence of multiple ways of knowing. The currently dominant knowledge production system of Western scientific knowledge often fails to meet those challenges due to its positivist and reductionist tendencies. However, embracing a co-existence of knowledges isn’t just necessary from a pragmatic perspective to adequately engage in those situations, but also represents an ethical imperative that includes acknowledging the colonial and oppressive history of Western scientific knowledge toward other knowledges, especially regarding Indigenous knowledge production systems. We propose adopting a narrative lens as a metaphor for embracing multiple ways of knowing and being as narratives play a key role for human cognition, communication and in shaping and expressing fundamental values at different levels. Using an example of contested narratives from a fisheries management conflict, we illustrate how narratives can help to develop a richer understanding of social-ecological conflicts. We also reflect on some narrative discourses commonly used in marine science that stem from the binary nature-culture divide prominent in Western scientific knowledge and discuss their implication for hindering sustainable ocean governance. Furthermore, we demonstrate how storytelling methods can be used to surface and share those narratives and to unravel the underlying values and fundamental beliefs and to re-shape them. The narrative lens we propose is suitable under multiple simultaneous disciplinary homes including Indigenous methodologies and systems thinking. They share the key features of having a holistic and relational approach that recognises the co-existence of multiple ways of knowing and being and use self-reflection as key for critical engagement with the situation and to surface and acknowledge one’s own internal narratives. This represents no exhaustive review of narrative inquiry, but a reflective journey illustrating how engaging with narratives can facilitate knowledge co-existence including different ways of relating to human and non-human beings.

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Copepods are marine invertebrates with a key role at the basis of marine food webs due to their high biomass as well as their elevated fatty acid (FA) content, particularly eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), two FA which have a well demonstrated role in growth and reproduction in marine organisms. Temperature is a key driver of organisms fitness as well as ecosystem functioning and sea surface temperature is expected to rise under all CO2 emission scenarios. Thus, understanding how copepods will response to such changes is crucial given their role in marine food webs. While the majority of research has focused on planktonic copepod species, less is known for benthic species, particularly non-model species. In this study we expose Microarthridion littorale, an intertidal benthic copepod to a temperature gradient (12, 15, 18, 21 and 24 °C) including current environmental variability as well as future scenarios. Individuals were retrieved from a mudflat in the Westerschelde estuary (51°21′ 24′′ N, 3° 42′ 51′′E) and cultured at lab conditions. Survival and FA were measured after 18 days exposure. Growth rates and nauplii production were also measured for each temperature treatment. We found decreased survival, EPA and DHA content with increased temperature as well as increased growth rates and detrimental effects for nauplii production. Benthic copepods are prey for many juvenile fish, any changes in their biomass as well as their FA composition in response to temperature changes could therefore amplify to higher trophic levels with important consequences for food web functioning.