Qualla: Shark Bay Marine Park

Shark Bay Marine Park: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian W. Schaller, FAL. The water is the wrong colour. Not the deep blue of the open ocean, but a luminous, almost milky turquoise that stretches to the horizon, so shallow and so clear that from a low-flying aircraft you can read the seafloor like a map. That colour is the giveaway: beneath the surface of Shark Bay grows the largest seagrass meadow on the planet, more than a thousand square kilometres of underwater pasture. It feeds turtles, it feeds sharks, and above all it feeds dugongs, the slow grey sea-cows that graze these shallows by the thousand. The Shark Bay Marine Park exists to protect all of it: 748,725 hectares of one of the most biologically extraordinary bodies of water in the world.

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Image: Brian W. Schaller | FAL

Shark Bay Marine Park: The Meadow Beneath the Sea

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Frank Vincentz, CC BY-SA 3.0. Twelve species of seagrass grow in Shark Bay, the greatest diversity gathered in one place anywhere on Earth. The heart of it is the Wooramel Seagrass Bank, which sprawls across roughly 103,000 hectares on the bay's eastern side, the largest structure of its kind on the planet. S...

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Image: Frank Vincentz | CC BY-SA 3.0

Shark Bay Marine Park: Sea-Cows and Their Kingdom

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian W. Schaller, FAL. Shark Bay shelters more than 10,000 dugongs, around one in eight of every dugong alive, one of the largest concentrations of these animals anywhere. They are gentle, secretive grazers, distant cousins of the elephant, hauling their barrel-shaped bodies slowly across the seagrass ...

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Image: Brian W. Schaller | FAL

Shark Bay Marine Park: The Dolphins of Monkey Mia

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian W. Schaller, FAL. On the bay's quieter eastern shore, at a beach called Monkey Mia, wild bottlenose dolphins have been swimming up to people in the shallows for more than fifty years. What began with local fishers sharing their catch became one of the most reliable wild-dolphin encounters on the p...

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Image: Brian W. Schaller | FAL

Shark Bay Marine Park: Drawing Lines on Water

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian W. Schaller, FAL. Protecting a place this rich means dividing it with invisible boundaries. The marine park is bordered by Steep Point, the westernmost tip of the Australian mainland, and by Cape Inscription on Dirk Hartog Island, where Dutch and French sailors first scratched their names into the...

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Image: Brian W. Schaller | FAL