Shark Bay

I used to live in Exmouth.

I went to Shark Bay not so long for a holiday with my family.

We went out on a fishing charter, and no joke, Five minutes, dropping a line in, the sharks were that bad, the skipper had to pull up and move, and that happened all day.

And they weren't little sharks.

In the deep past, these structures may have dotted shallow seas, forming low living mounds beneath sunlight and water.

Some living stromatolites resemble Earth's oldest visible ecosystems, At places such as Shark Bay in Western Australia, modern microbial mats still build stromatolite-like structures in shallow, salty water.

They give us a rare glimpse of how ancient ecosystems may have worked before animals became abundant.

These living forms survive best where grazing creatures are limited or conditions are too harsh for many competitors.

Yeah.

I think up in Shark Bay, or was it Broome or Shark Bay, they're leaving them in for 12 months.

Yeah.

Are they?

Yeah

... and Shark Bay.

Mm-hmm.

Um, you, you keep punching on.

So it's sort of still on that, when I say the mainland, it's not out on the arm of Shark Bay.

It's, it's on, on the main, the main-

Main road.

... definitely check that one out.

And it's all kind of the southern reef.

So it's from Shark Bay and WA down around the south coast, the north bit of Tassie, and then it's all the way up the New South Wales coastline up to about Foster.

So the northern range edge is in Wallace Lake.

um and it is our largest seagrass species here in new south wales so they can grow up to a meter meter and a half in length so as you can imagine any kind of animal swimming through there would have protection from predators um and with that it's just forming this really dense canopy so a lot of our other seagrass is our faster growing and they grow really really quickly but quite small and with posidonia it's super slow growing and it's also extremely old um so some of our meadows have been around for hundreds of thousands of years And with this, recovery is extremely slow.

And a few years ago, we actually found out that the largest known organism on Earth is Posidonia australis.

So a paper came out.

by Jane Edgelow over in Shark Bay, WA, and they found this one individual was roughly 180 kilometers, all geniper the same, which is just this mega clone that's been there for thousands of years, living just underneath the water.

So I think that is really exciting.

Okay.

A small population of dolphins in Shark Bay, Australia do something unique.

They...

Oh, here's Jesse back.

Okay.

Certainly, I like that transition.

Yeah, and if he were to do that, he would have something in common with the dolphins of Shark Bay, Australia.

No. He'd do something quite unique.

You may remember if you've watched earlier episodes, I talk about these stromatolites, like these bacterial colonies, these mounds.

There's a place called Shark Bay that I believe is in Australia.

You can see pictures of them.

They still exist today.

And that's, like, that's him putting it on a map being like, okay, I walked from...

Alice Springs to Broome, Shark Bay to Broome, not like including, obviously, while he's trapping camels and stuff, he's going to clock way more Ks just in your day-to-day doing stuff like that.

And, yeah, so that's Luke.

That's one of the blokes that the documentary's about.

But we need to get out camping before I do.

That's one thing.

I was actually meant to be caravanning this coming weekend, going to Shark Bay.

Lovely.

And some of those are unique to this region.

And you go to the international biodiversity hotspot that we're talking about is actually a big area from Shark Bay through to Esperance, the whole southwest region.

But in that region, there's at least 8,000 different species.

And these are just numbers, but actually the number just keeps growing because as scientists work on the plants themselves, still we are finding new plants all the time, which is quite amazing in the 21st century.