Help ! Sim cannot survey Ocean wildlife

any time I've had to survey something for a task something has to be discovered for that survey to count. There will be a pop up. I'm on the conservationist side at the moment. so I would assume it works the same both ways

It only works with turtles for me. Find them swimming near the shallow water buoy, and if you hover over one, cursor changes and you have the option to survey there.

It's badly explained. If you survey ocean wildlife from buoy all you do is help clean up the island.
In order for this specific task to count you must find clickable wildlife in the ocean, which basically only means turtles and sometimes small schools of small silvery fishes (NOT the fishing spot schools).
You supposedly can survey corals but I have never found a clickable one.

Thankyou , My sim has been swimming around that buoy for days and never got anywhere. But finally she did reach level 10 despite never being able to complete that task.
Now thanks to you , I know what my sim was doing wrong and if it should ever come up again I will know what to do.

"Frn0731;c-17172666" wrote:
Thankyou , My sim has been swimming around that buoy for days and never got anywhere. But finally she did reach level 10 despite never being able to complete that task.
Now thanks to you , I know what my sim was doing wrong and if it should ever come up again I will know what to do.

I have found that my sims are better at finding clickable stuff than I am.
If you swim over a coral reef but NOT close to a buoy and just... leave the sim threading water in nowhere, suddenly you see him or her surveying ocean wildlife, because the sim has just found something to do, basically.

@Karin_Chan look for the fish swimming and jumping out of the ocean - zoom in close - some will be clickable

I'm having the same problem, does it for hours, but task never gets marked as completed

That interaction is a PITA. It doesn't help that there's an option at some buoys that says "survey ocean" or something like that, that is not a valid interaction for the job.
You have to basically pixel hunt: Zoom out a bit, look straight down into the ocean and pause the game. Then just either look for turtles (you said you had none) or clickable fish. Either the ones jumping, or schools of silver fish under the water.

@Beardedgeek true - not valid for the job - can't figure this one out