When Daniela was eight years old, she moved to Syria. It was that move that sparked her passion for marine biology

When Daniela Ceccarelli was eight years old, she moved from Italy to Syria.

It was there that she fell in love with the ocean.

At first, it doesn't add up. Syria isn't a place you immediately think of when talking about marine life, but Ceccarelli tells nine.com.au that it was holidays on the coast with crystal clear water lined with limestone cliffs that first sparked her passion.

"I would just always be in the water with my mask on," she recalls.

At the time, she was attending an international school, explaining that her principal "had a passion for nature".

"He would gather the whole school once a week to have us watch [David Attenborough's] Life on Earth," she says

"I was about 10, 11, I think, and one of the episodes had divers in it, and I was like, 'oh, that's what I want to do'.

"And it's never really left me, that desire to be in the water, to be looking at marine life, to be understanding the ocean and close to it somehow."

Ceccarelli later moved to Switzerland, a landlocked country with little opportunity to explore marine life. But she never gave up, eventually moving to Australia to study marine biology at James Cook University after she graduated.

"I just wanted to be in it; I wanted to be involved in studying and understanding the ocean," she says.

"I wanted to be directly involved, not at a remove where you're writing about it or in the lab or on the computer, but actually underwater, at the coalface actually looking at things and trying to understand how things work and trying to understand also how as humans we can make a difference in a positive way rather than always in a negative way."

After completing her Bachelor of Science, Ceccarelli went on to do a master's degree and completed her PhD in 2004. Throughout almost her entire studies, she was also raising two young kids.

"From then on, I didn't look back. I just stayed as a contractor, independently working from contract to contract," she says, explaining that she wanted to work in a way that allowed her flexibility to spend time with her children.

Today, she works at the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) as part of the Long Term Monitoring Program, which she says has always been a "legendary program".

"This is the biggest and longest and most consistent dataset of coral reefs anywhere in the world, and so they've always been a bit legendary. I'm really happy to be part of this team," she says.

While becoming a marine biologist is the dream of many young people in Australia, Ceccarelli recalls it being an "outlandish" idea when she was growing up.

"It was like, 'What? Is that even a job?' No one had heard of it," she says.

And while many think that the job is simply swimming with dolphins, Ceccarelli says that's only partly the truth.

"My day can be one of two things. If I'm on dry land, I spend some of my days down at the AIMS main office in Townsville ... I would be basically sitting at my computer. Not particularly glamorous at all," she explains.

"But what I would be doing is looking at the data that we collect. So, looking at numbers and basically doing statistical techniques that will allow those numbers to tell a story."

Then, on the other end of the spectrum, Ceccarelli spends around 120 days a year living on a boat.

"My team would typically do three-week trips, so three weeks at a time where we might not touch land," she says.

"We just basically get handed a schedule. This is when you're going to be at sea. And then our life revolves around that schedule in the year."

Each day at sea starts with a morning meeting where the leader of the trip will lay out the plan for the day before all gearing up to get in the water.

Ceccarelli and her team are then transferred to two smaller boats and start the day with a process called "manta tow".

"We're basically getting skull dragged along holding onto a board, and we give really quick scores to the coral and some of the fish," she explains.

"The boat goes for two minutes, and after two minutes it'll stop, and we'll write things down on the board with our pencil, and then the boat goes again.

"We do that until we've gone around the whole reef perimeter ... that usually takes anything up to two hours."

Each year, Ceccarelli and her team go back to the same spots to measure the difference from year to year.

After changing into their scuba gear, Ceccarelli and her team will lay out surveyor tapes to ensure they are covering the same area before using them to swim along and measure the amount of coral and fish.

"I'm on the fish team, I'm trained to know the names of all the fish," she explains.

"So I swim along, and I count fish, literally. I have to write down their names in Latin and how many there are, and also I have to estimate their size so we get quite good at being able to tell how long the fish are."

The rest of the day is pretty much spent in the water, recording measurements on special underwater paper, before heading back to the boat to record their findings.

While it might not be exactly swimming with dolphins, it's probably the closest you can get in a professional sense.

Working with AIMS, Ceccarelli surveys the Great Barrier Reef, but her previous work took her out beyond the reef to the Coral Sea, which she describes as "the middle of nowhere", as well as places such as Tonga, the Marshall Islands, and Tuvalu – the latter of which ended up resulting in a career highlight more than a decade later.

"When I was still consulting in 2010, I got a contract to go to Tuvalu and do some surveys of the fish there on the reef. So pretty well what I do for AIMS, I would swim along and count the fish," she recalls.

"And we wrote a big report for the Tuvalu government. And then last year, I got invited by National Geographic's Pristine Seas group to go back to Tuvalu because they'd found my work online.

"So last year I ended up on the National Geographic boat all the way out in the Pacific, which was awesome. That was probably a career highlight for me."

Produced in partnership with CareerOne.