Shark Bay, Australia

All right, ladies and gents, last week we chatted about Shell Beach in Australia. For this week’s adventure, we’re going to pack up our fins and snorkels and head to Shark Bay again, but this time we’ll focus on the area as a whole. And remember, please keep your hands to yourself and watch where you put your feet; we are guests in their environment, and we don’t want to accidentally poke a shark!

Shark Bay is located on the most westerly point of the Australian continent and has been recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1991. The protected area covers about 2.2 million hectares. That’s a lot of area, but how do you visualize that?

Well, Shark Bay is about the size of 2.2 million rugby fields, or baseball fields, smashed together in one giant area. If you’re not a sports fan, then visualize Shark Bay as being about the size of New Jersey and roughly half the size of Switzerland. Anyways, that’s a lot of protected area, and 70% of it includes the surrounding marine waters.

Many aspects make this area unique.

It has one of the largest, most diverse seagrass beds in the world with at least 16 different species of seagrass. It’s one of three places in the world where you can look at stromatolites, which I’ll talk about later; for now, I’ll just tell you they are one of the oldest forms of life on Earth—they’re like living fossils!

Shark Bay is home to around 200 species of birds, almost 100 species of reptiles, and several marine species, many of which are threatened or endangered. It has a large population of marine life, including dolphins, dugongs, sharks, rays, two species of endangered sea turtles, and two species of whales, not to mention all of the fish and invertebrates drawn to the seagrass beds.

This area is so important to so very many species living on land and in the water, and it gives you an interesting look at biological and geological evolution overtime. This is the perfect place to go to if you love birds, reptiles, plants, or the ocean—I think I could spend a whole week here and still not do everything I’d like to!

There are all sorts of things to do at Shark Bay! You can dive and snorkel in the waters. There’s a marine park, an aquarium, and a national park to explore. There are guided land tours, boat tours, dive tours, and marine safaris! You can see dolphins, whales, sharks, Manta rays, Green turtles, Loggerhead turtles, and dugongs!

You can explore the seagrass bed or the surrounding land area. There’s Shell Beach to relax at and the Hamelin Pool stromatolites to see! There’s so much, and I’m so ready to pack my bags and go myself—if I ever get the money and the time to go. For those of you who can go, please experience this place and maybe share all your cool stories!

Sources and cool links:
https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/578
https://www.sharkbay.org/about/
https://www.australiascoralcoast.com/destination/shark-bay-world-heritage-area
https://oceanpark.com.au/shark-bay/

Shell Beach, Australia

Not every beach is made of sand.

In fact, there are beaches that are made up of volcanic rocks, pebbles, shells, and coral. I’ve been lucky enough to snorkel from a beach that was made up of dead, broken pieces of coral that were piled up from thousands of years of heavy coastal storms. What materials a beach is comprised of can tell you a lot about the area, including how much energy is involved through wind and wave action, what the waves are like, and the history of the beach—but those are topics for another post!

Today we head over to Australia, the continent of many species that could and will kill you. However, the beach that I’ll be talking about is probably one of the safest places to swim, especially for those who aren’t strong swimmers.

Shell Beach, is found within Western Australia’s Shark Bay, making it an embayed beach. This beach is unique for a few reasons.

The first unique feature is that the immediate water has a salinity that is twice that of the ocean! This occurs because the rate of evaporation is greater than the rate that rain falls, so more water is lost due to the heat than is replaced. When the salt water evaporates, the salt stays behind. Add to this the fact that a massive sea grass bed sits at the mouth of the bay, blocking a lot of tidal flow, and this makes for a super salty environment.

But it’s okay, because this leads into the second unique thing about this place. The salty water conditions have created a safe haven for a specific kind of shelled creature, Fragum erugatum, which is a species of cockle. A cockle is a bivalve—its shell is divided into two halves—and it is very similar to oysters and clams.

The f. erugatum cockle can survive the hypersalinity of the waters of Shell Beach, but its natural predators cannot, meaning that this species thrives in this place. In fact, they’ve survived here in L’Haridon Bight for thousands of years with no decline in their population.

How can we tell? When shelled organisms die, their bodies are consumed or they decay, leaving only their shells behind. So when f. erugatum cockles die, their shells remain in the area, and over thousands of years their shells eventually replaced all the sand and other sediments of the beach.

Today, Shell Beach stretches for about 44 miles and is comprised of only cockle shells, and the shells extend about 26−30ft down below the immediate surface. That’s a lot of shells! The shells even make up the sea bed and stretch quite a ways into the bay. On the back part of the beach there are so many shells that they’ve fused together in places to form large hard shapes, which were mined for a while to make decorative blocks until Shark Bay became a protected site.

I think this beach would be a cool place to go because it is so different. Not a lot of creatures can survive the water, so you don’t have to worry so much about potential animal accidents. And the water is easy to float in, much like the Dead Sea in Jordan, so it’s a great place to relax and float in peace. Also, the beach is a pretty snow-white color and was created in such an inspiring way, at least to someone like me!

Sources and cool links:
Ocean: The Definitive Visual Guide made by the American Museum of Natural History
https://www.australiascoralcoast.com/destination/shell-beach
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/shell-beach
https://parks.dpaw.wa.gov.au/park/shell-beach

Jellyfish Lake

Photo of golden jellyfish in Jellyfish Lake, Palau. Photo taken by Dr. Alex Mustard, and more can be found on his website http://www.amustard.com/

I’m going to take a brief interlude to talk about something different. Don’t worry though I have a reason for this!

Several archipelagos dot the Pacific Ocean, but today I’m going to talk about one in particular. The Republic of Palau is made up of several hundred islands that are populated by a people who have been shaped by the sea and nature. There are so many cool islands to choose from, I bet you could easily spend a few years there and still not see everything. Today, though, we’re going to focus on a unique lake found in the Rock Islands of Palau, Jellyfish Lake.

Jellyfish Lake is a brackish marine lake that is located near the sea. The lake is fed by rainwater, but it isn’t considered a fresh water lake because it’s a bit saltier than freshwater, although it doesn’t match the salinity of the nearby ocean. Jellyfish Lake is also largely isolated from the ocean, so where does the salt water come from?

One of the unique things about this lake is that they’ve found tunnels and fissures in the surrounding limestone that actually connect the lake to the ocean, and that’s where the salt comes from. However, another unique thing about this lake is that unlike other tropical lakes there’s no circulation movement of water.
In other words, the lake has no current and the wind only affects the surface water, so the lake has developed distinct layers making this a meromictic lake. As cool as that sounds, the coolest thing about the lake is how it got its name.

Jellyfish Lake is home to the nonstinging Golden Jellyfish, which can’t be found anywhere else in the world! The main attraction to this place is the sheer number of jellyfish that you can find in the lake–at least over a million of little animals to safely swim with!

The biggest reason I wanted to talk about this lake is because I want to visit it myself. For a while, Palau officials closed the lake to tourism due to a drastic drop in the Golden Jellyfish numbers, so they wanted to run studies and try to help the jellyfish population.

Now, the numbers are back at healthy levels and they have reopened the lake to visitors. So grab your fins, snorkel, and mask and go have a relaxing swim with these harmless jellyfish and experience a world unlike any other—I know I’m going to!

Read more about jellyfish and Jellyfish Lake here:
https://coralreefpalau.org/research/marine-lakes/jellyfish-lake/
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/jellyfish-lake
https://palaudiveadventures.com/palau-jellyfish-lake/