Marley and Chae are two brothers grew up in the city of Geraldton, but descendants from Malgana Traditional Owners of Shark Bay. As a life choice, they decided to leave behind the city life and get back to their roots, moving to the land of their ancestors.
In Shark Bay they are working with Tidal Moon, an Aboriginal business involved in sustainable sea cucumber trade and environmental conservation.
They say:"We have a fulfill feeling when we help to preserve our environment like our ancestors did. We want to make them proud of us". Shark Bay Australia
On the edge of the Australian continent where the far west coast meets the sea is the Shark Bay World Heritage Area. This westernmost part of Australia has a unique combination of wildlife, flora and stunning scenery unlike that found anywhere else. Shark Bay is actually two bays sheltered by peninsulas and a long island. The local Malgana Aboriginal people know it as Gutharraguda, meaning ‘two waters’. Marine environments cover about 70% of the Shark Bay World Heritage Area. The average depth of the clear sheltered waters is only nine metres and they are beautifully patterned with seagrass meadows, channels and banks. The ‘W’ shape makes for coastline meandering more than 1,500km. It includes tidal flats, mangrove communities and white shell beaches in the shelter of the bay, and rocky reefs and cliffs on the deep seaward sides. In 1991, has been created the Shark Bay Marine Park encompasses 748,725 hectares ensuring the long term protection of its important ecosystem. Shark Bay Australia
Murujuga, meaning “hip bone sticking out” in the Ngarluma-Yaburara language, refers to Murujuga land and sea "country" and consists of a narrow peninsula of land as well as 42 islands located near the town of Dampier in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. Aboriginal people have a deep and spiritual connection to their Ngurra or traditional "country". For Australian Aboriginal people, the land and the people are connected, both physically and spiritually. There is the belief amongst Australian Aboriginal people that if "country gets sick" (damaged, degraded, polluted) then they too will become ill, and might even die. By protecting the land, the people are also protected.
With over one million recorded petroglyphs, Murujuga has the world’s largest concentration of ancient rock art, date back more than 40 000 years. The fish depicted in the picture is a symbol that testifies the ancient bond between the indigenous people and the marine environment. Karratha Australia
In terms of climate change mitigation, seagrass meadows can store 35 times more carbon than a hectare of rainforest.
During the last century, Cockburn Sound (WA) loss more than 85 per cent of seagrass meadows with devastating effects on native fish populations in the area.
Since 2018 OzFish has been leading the restoration of seagrass meadows in the area, with a community-driven program called "Seeds For Snapper" which in the years became the largest and longest-running restoration program of its kind in Australia.
In these waters, volunteers collect the seagrass fruit bringing them to the processing facility on shore, where they will mature in tanks and then dispersed once again out at sea, maximizing the seagrass flourishing. Cockburn Sound Australia
Clockwise from left, Psalmoi Gristwood, Eric Silas, Redmond Baira and Manny McAvoy are Traditional Owners working as Sea Ranger along the Great Barrier Reef. Among the many other environmental conservation projects in which they are involved from Bundaberg to Cairns, they work on the IVF program of the Great Barrier Reef Foundation in the Whitsundays Islands. This program consist in capture excess coral eggs and sperm from healthy reefs during mass coral spawning, and rear millions of baby corals in specially designed floating pools. These young corals are then released on damaged reefs, helping to repopulate and restore them. Whitsundays Islands Australia
Climate change, pollution and unsustainable fishing practices are creating a marine biodiversity crisis. Environmental DNA (eDNA), genomics and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have the potential to transform ocean conservation.
The Minderoo OceanOmics Centre at UWA is equipped with eDNA preparations areas, flow cytometry, a computational biology lab and the latest high-throughput sequencing technologies (Illumina, PacBio and Oxford Nanopore Technologies).
The OceanOmics program is advancing marine genomics and bioinformatics to combat threats to ocean health, through biodiversity monitoring programs. Perth Australia
Dr Georgina Wood, marine ecologist specialising in kelp restoration and genomics, is checking for reproductive "sorus" tissue prior to spore release. Once the spores are released they are kept under red light to prevent development into the large "sporophyte stage". George leads the Green Gravel work as part of her post-doctoral research with the Wernberg Filbee-Dexter lab at the University of Western Australia. She has worked on the restoration of underwater forests across Australia’s Great Southern Reef for the past 8 years, with a particular interest in how we can harness genomic information to bolster kelp population resilience in the face of climate change. Perth Australia
A juvenile six month old Ecklonia radiata or ‘golden kelp’ being reared in the aquarium at Watermans’ Bay Aquarium in Perth, Western Australia. This golden kelp individual was grown from a remnant population of survivors from the 2011 marine heatwave and are expected to be more resilient to the current and future ocean conditions as sea temperatures change. Golden kelp is one of the most widespread kelps globally, and is the main kelp found across Australia’s Great Southern Reef, where it forms vast forests that are the home and food for thousands of unique species of animals. Over the past 50 years there has been an accelerating loss of kelp forest cover globally with over one million hectares of kelp forests currently considered to be in a degraded state. In Western Australia, researchers at the university of Western Australia are trialing a novel technique, ‘Green Gravel’, to restore up to 100,000 ha of kelp forests that were lost during a marine heatwave in 2011. Green Gravel is a technique whereby baby kelps are ‘seeded’ onto gravel and rocks and then outplanted in the field following a period of being reared in an aquarium. The juvenile macroalgae can overgrow or move off the substrate and attach to the underlying reef, forming the basis of a new macroalgal forest that can expand naturally over time. Perth Australia
David Juszkiewicz, PhD candidate of Molecular and Life Science at Curtin University, imaging the living corallites of a massive Porites bommie along the Ningaloo Reef. This step is carried out before sampling a colony so that there are relevant in-situ images connected with the sample that is to be collected. This documentation can revealing important features when identifying a Porites species, to add to an integrative taxonomic approach is completed (using morphology, reproductivity and molecular analyses). Ningaloo Reef Australia
Scientist researchers from ECU are measuring the oxygen rate of a Syringodium isoetifolium seagrass sample produced at a set temperature in the MERL lab facility of Exmouth. Samples collected along Ningaloo Reef are placed into sealed chambers to conduct heat-stress experiments for studying the opportunity to build thermal resilience into seagrass meadows by identifying if there are populations which are stronger to higher temperatures. Exmouth Australia
Dr. Annika Lamb checks the status of branching corals grew using the AGF (Assisted Gene Flow) hybridisation tecnique inside the experimental tanks of AIMS (Australian Institute of MarineScience) SeaSim lab. Through AGF it's possible to enhance the spread of naturally warm-adapted genes across the Great Barrier Reef to buffer populations on cooler reefs against continued warming and bleaching. The success of this approach relies on pre-existing genes for local temperature adaptation and parental transmission of temperature tolerance. Townsville Australia
The Abrolhos Islands, situated off the coast of Western Australia, stand out as a unique and ecologically significant marine environment due to its particular position which makes them a crossroads between the temperate and tropical waters. For this particular reason, the marine environments around the Abrolhos Islands encompass a range of habitats, including coral reefs, seagrass meadows, lagoons, sandy bottoms, and rocky shores. Parts of the Abrolhos Islands are protected within marine reserves, contributing to the conservation of biodiversity and the preservation of critical habitats. Abrolhos Islands Australia
New research from the Australian Institute of Marine Science and the University of Melbourne indicates that adult fragments of a coral species can better tolerate bleaching and recover faster when treated with tougher heat-evolved symbionts. Symbionts are the tiny cells of algae that live inside the coral tissue, providing corals with energy to grow. The survival of reef-building corals depends on this mutually beneficial relationship. When temperatures become too warm this relationship breaks down, causing the algae to be lost from the coral animal and turning it white. This is known as coral bleaching. The symbionts used in this study had their heat tolerance bolstered in the lab by exposing multiple generations to elevated temperatures for 10 years. The heat-evolved symbionts have then been offered to coral fragments which had been previously chemically bleached. The scientists found the symbionts were able to maintain a symbiosis with corals for two years, promoting faster coral recovery from bleaching and enhancing their heat tolerance without trading off on growth. Australia
Magnus Edwards is a Dyirribarra Traditional Owners involved in the Goondoi Ranger program, managing the land and sea Country along the Innisfail coast.
Their collaborative management approaches integrate traditional ecological knowledge with contemporary conservation practices, help protect marine environments.
He says: "I'm feeling very peaceful when I'm alone in the nature. Sometimes it happen to think about my ancestors, who lived this place thousands of years ago. I can still feel their spirit here.
I wish people would respect more the environment and being more mindful of where they are, seeking knowledge from indigenous people to have a better understanding of the place they are visiting". Innisfail Australia
Seagrass meadows are incredibly important for the marine ecosystem as the support thousands of living organism, from microscopical bacteria to megafauna such as turtle, dolphins and dugongs. Believed to be at least 4,500 years old and measuring more than 180 square kilometers, the meadows of Posidonia Australis in Shark Bay, is classified the "biggest plant on Earth" as its clones form one genetically identical individual. Since 1910, Australia has warmed on average by 1.4⁰C as a result of climate change. Especially from 2010 to 2011, Western Australia experienced a marine heatwave that saw temperatures rise by up to 5⁰C in some coastal waters. Due to this warming event, Shark Bay lost around 36% of the seagrass, with the ecosystem still recovering today. Damage to the seagrass is likely to have released some of the carbon locked up within it into the atmosphere, as well as affecting the animals it supports. Although large part of the Posidonia Australis meadow has survived extreme weather events in recent years, beginning its recover, there are concerns that it could perish as global temperatures continue to rise. Australia
The Ardyaloon Hatchery is a research station run by Bardi-Jawi Traditional Owners in conjunction with the Department of Fisheries to preserve the Trochus Niloticus shell. This almost extinct animal holds a great significance for Aboriginal people, who used them for ceremonies and commercial trade.
The hatchery has been successful in restocking juvenile trochus to support community members commercially fishing for the species and for sale to the Australian aquarium industry. Ardyaloon Australia
From left to right, Coastal Marine Ecosystems Research Centre (CMERC) PhD research fellow Andria Ostrowski, and PhD students Alexandra Williams and Anna Hegarty are collecting seagrass spathes (i.e., flowers) from Zostera muelleri flowering shoots at Lillies Beach in Gladstone.
Researchers at CMERC aim to advance seed-based seagrass restoration techniques for improved restoration outcomes, enhancing the ability to restore meadows on large-scale. Their goals are to identify optimal conditions for long-term seed storage, increased germination rates and viability, and effective seed dispersal methods to promote recovery and enhance resilience of seagrass meadows to future disturbance events. Gladstone Australia
Tom Poland is one of the elder Malgana Traditional Owner currently living in Shark Bay. He's now a retired fisherman, but during his life he witnessed many environmental changes happened in the region.
He says: "I've been fishing for more than 40 years in Shark Bay and even if it looks still wonderful and abundant, it's nothing compare to when I was younger. Tourism and commercial fishing had a big impact on the environment, but the greatest impact I think it's due to the Useless Loop salt mine.
Since then there have been a decrease in fish population and consequent marine mammals migration towards more unspoiled area". Shark Bay Australia
Anthony Edwards, Dyirribarra Traditional Owner, draws on the Fly Fish Point beach the Dreamtime story of the stingray (Minggamingga). In Aboriginal mythology, the Dreamtime is a sacred era in which ancestral beings created the world and its features. Dreamtime stories involving rays often carry moral or cultural lessons. These stories may teach about the importance of respecting nature, understanding the interconnectedness of all living beings, and passing down cultural values to younger generations. In some coastal Aboriginal communities, rays are also associated with navigational knowledge. The movement or behavior of rays might be observed to predict changes in weather or tides, providing valuable information for seafaring activities. Innisfail Australia
An OceanOmics researcher is using the sampling device use eDNA Ascension to collect seawater in the Houtman Abrolhos Archipelago. eDNA enables researchers to detect and identify species present in an environment by analyzing DNA traces left behind in the environment. It has proven to be a powerful and non-invasive method for surveying species diversity, particularly in aquatic environments where traditional survey methods might be challenging or invasive. Understanding the presence and distribution of species through eDNA analysis can inform conservation strategies, help identify threatened or endangered species, and contribute to more effective ecosystem protection and restoration. The Pangaea Ocean Explorer, a research vessel of Minderoo Foundation, has already embarked on nine voyages, enabling sample collection and onboard genomic analyses for monitoring of the health of Australia’s ocean wildlife. Australia
The environmental DNA (eDNA) sampling device developed by Ocean Diagnostics with support from the Minderoo Foundation. The device, called eDNA Ascencion, enables the collection of seven independent samples from up to 400 m depth. The sampler also acquires critical supporting data such as seawater filtered volume, flow rate, depth, seawater temperature and latitude and longitude. Automated and high-throughput solutions for biodiversity monitoring play a pivotal role in endeavours to better understand and conserve the precious marine species and ecosystem resources. Abrolhos Islands Australia
Technological advancements to enable the deployment of environmental DNA (eDNA) analysis at speed and scale are validated by benchmarking against conventional, low-throughout methods for eDNA isolation from seawater. In this photo, Minderoo Foundation’s Research Assistant Alex McLennan is filtering 4 seawater samples to capture eDNA on filter membranes. DNA, the blueprint for all life on Earth, yields critical information on the species that live in the ocean and health status of marine environments. Abrolhos Islands Australia
Spore release of Ecklonia radiata to create new culture stock for restoration and experiments. Kelp has a two-stage life cycle, where the large ‘sporophyte’ stage releases kelp spores that then develop into microscopic ‘gametophytes’ that can be cultured in the lab indefinitely before seeding onto Green Gravel. Researchers work quickly overnight following field collection during the kelp’s reproductive window to clean the kelp tissue, cut it into discs for ease of spore release. The spores will then be mixed into filtered seawater in experimental flasks and will be used for restoration experiments for years to come. Perth Australia
Deep ocean trenches and plateau are the most unexplored parts of the planet. We have just few datas on their ecosystems, and yet more to discover.
The UWA Deep-Sea Research Center in collaboration with Minderoo Foundation are the first to study the deepest parts of the Indian Ocean in Australia, aiming to understand how the supply of organic (and inorganic) matter - "marine snow" - is linked to oceanography and the presence and abundance of animals living on and near the seafloor.
Through landers and observatories deployments to 6000 meters and more, they monitor not only the presence of wildlife, but also temperatures, conductivity, currents intensity and oxygen levels in the water. Thanks to these studies, it will be possible to better comprehend the importance of the deep marine ecosystem and how it can be affected by human activities and climate change. Gascoyne Marine Park Australia
The UWA Deep-Sea Research Center in collaboration with Minderoo Foundation are the first to study the deepest parts of the Indian Ocean in Australia, aiming to understand how the supply of organic (and inorganic) matter - "marine snow" - is linked to oceanography and the presence and abundance of animals living on and near the seafloor.
The map on board of the vessel Adrianus used for the Gascoyne Marine Park deep sea expedition shows the abyssal plains, the fracture zones and the escarpments subject of studies in the Indian Ocean. Gascoyne Marine Park Australia
Master’s student Lindsey Kraemer, from James Cook University, is searching for an Acropora coral colony for sampling. Small corals samples are collected for lab analysis including DNA sequencing and taxonomy to understand how the patterns of symbiosis change over space and within different species. The genetic code of each sample will be examined using high-throughput genetic sequencing of each coral genome as well as their unique symbiont community composition. Ningaloo Reef Australia
David Juszkiewicz, PhD Candidate, Curtin University, School of Molecular and Life Sciences, and Lindsey Kraemer, master’s student from James Cook University, are sampling and picture a massive Porites in Ningaloo Reef. The genetic code of each sample will be examined using high-throughput genetic sequencing of each coral genome as well as their unique symbiont community composition. In addition, all samples are deposited to their respective natural history museum. Having images associated with the samples becomes valuable information for future scientists if they decide to re-examine or use the sample for a different research project. Ningaloo Reef Australia
Dr. Kate Quigley, Principal Researcher at Minderoo Foundation and ARC DECRA Fellow at James Cook University, inspects glass scintillation vials with preserved coral samples taken from Ningaloo reef. The genetic code of each sample will be examined using high-throughput genetic sequencing of each coral genome as well as their unique symbiont community composition. Exmouth Australia
The Australian Institute of Marine Science is at the forefront of research aimed at understanding and studying the reproductive behavior and processes of corals, including hybrid coral spawning.
Coral spawning is a remarkable natural phenomenon where corals release their eggs and sperm into the water simultaneously, resulting in the fertilization and subsequent development of new coral colonies. AIMS has been involved in extensive studies to understand the timing, triggers, and environmental factors influencing coral spawning events.
Hybrid coral spawning research within SeaSim involves the investigation of reproductive activities between different species or genetically distinct populations of corals. Understanding hybridization and its implications for the genetic diversity and resilience of coral populations is essential in the context of climate change and threats to coral reefs. Townsville Australia
The Ocean Siren is a 4m high illuminated sculpture by artist Jason deCaires Taylor and inspired by Takoda Johnson, a young indigenous girl from the Wulgurukaba tribe. It serves as a warning signal about the warming seas' threat to the Great Barrier Reef. The sculpture showcases Takoda holding a traditional indigenous communication device, a Bayliss shell, while looking out towards Magnetic Island and the Great Barrier Reef. At night, the sculpture's colour changes based on daily water temperature data from an AIMS weather station on Davies Reef, resembling a heat sensing camera image which pass from blue (<20.5°C) to red (>28.6°C). Townsville Australia
