Shark Bay – Denham & Monkey Mia

The Shark Bay World Heritage Area is quite an amazing place; it is home to some of the oldest life forms on earth (even before Jo and I got there), it has one of the largest and most diverse sea grass beds in the world and has the second largest dolphin research centre in the world.

Stromatolites

Stromatolites are colonies of microbial mats that form hard, dome shaped deposits found in Hamelin Pool and thought to date back 3.5 billion years to a time when no other complex creatures were present on the planet. In all honesty they are hard to get particularly excited about though; they don’t look very interesting and unless you are a scientist with a very strong interest in microbes you tick the ‘I have seen something really old’ box and move on.

Shell Beach

Shell Beach is exactly as the name implies, a beach that consist of trillions of tiny shells from one type of animal; the Fragum cockle. This section of Shark Bay is impacted by the presence of the Faure Sill a sandbar that overlays sandstone and crosses the eastern gulf of Shark Bay. This feature limits the outgoing tidal water flow which, combined with high levels of evaporation, means that the water salinity in this area is nearly twice that of seawater. The result is that nothing can live in the water here except (drum roll) the Fragum cockle which due to the lack of competition or predators results in an incredible abundance of this single species.

Denham

Denham is the main population centre of Shark Bay and is the westernmost publicly accessible town in Australia. In reality Denham today survives as the tourist destination for exploring Shark Bay and as such is very much geared towards tourists. From a tourists perspective it is a pleasant town and well located for exploring the Shark Bay area and all it has to offer. Just outside of Denham you are able to leave the security of the sealed tarmac roads to head into the Francois Peron National Park on the unsealed roads. It is possible to travel 10km on these roads in a 2WD vehicle to reach the Peron Heritage Precinct which is a very worthwhile visit giving an insight into the pastoral days of the area during the early to mid 20th century when sheep were farmed here for their wool. The key takeaway from this visit is that certainly in developed countries today we are soft, very soft . . . I simply cannot imagine anyone from the UK lasting a day if they were made to work in the conditions that existed on a good day in this working environment let-alone a day in mid summer when temperatures regularly rise above 50deg C.

Monkey Mia

Contrary to its name Monkey Mia is not know for monkeys but dolphins. I am not sure why when realising the tourist attraction of dolphins this resort was not renamed ‘Dolphin Mia’ other than perhaps they were looking to achieve an element of surprise; pull the punters in with the faux promise of monkeys and then delight them with dolphins? Anyway what matters is it works, this place does pull the punters in with its daily dolphin ‘interaction’ sessions for which the dolphins themselves unfailingly turn-up enticed only by a ‘snack’ that amounts to less than 10% of their required daily diet. Whilst this is undoubtedly a gimmick I suppose it is necessary to support the important work of dolphin research – Monkey Mia boasts the second largest dolphin research facility in the world (after Florida).

Whilst I find it hard to disguise my cynicism in relation to this interaction I can understand its purpose but what was much more interesting for me was the trip we had on Aristocat 2 and what I learned during this trip. I knew nothing about sea grass before our tour out into the sea grass fields in Shark Bay and was impressed to learn that these fields are thought to be the largest sea grass fields in the world. More importantly though sea grass captures 2.7 times the amount of CO2 that trees do; the sea grass fields of Shark Bay store more CO2 than the Amazon rainforest. Being a simple minded man this immediately raised the question in my mind of why, instead of being told constantly what us as human beings need to stop doing in order to ‘save’ the planet, why the message doesn’t turn to what we can do? By positioning sandbags on the sea bed in the shallow waters of Shark Bay sea grass seedlings latch on and take root thereby helping to repair damaged and generate new sea grass beds; seems like a low cost, high benefit measure that can serve to both provide the marine habitat required by the vulnerable Dugong as well as collecting and storing CO2 from the atmosphere.

See Gallery Pictures Here