Life in the Sea

The afternoon of the second day an the morning of the third day of the bus tour north ended up revolving around critters that live in the ocean. Appropriately, we started with one of the oldest organisms on earth: stromatolites. To make a long story short, 3.5 billion years ago, when the earth's atmosphere was mostly comprised of carbon dioxide, stromatolites appeared and over billions of years eventually produced enough oxygen to raise the oxygen percentage to a point that other life forms could flourish. In other words, if it were not for stromatolites, none of use would be here today. Unfortunately, it was a very low tide when we visited them in Shark Bay, so they simply look like black rocks sticking out of the water...

The next stop was a small marine park that has been created outside of Denham, our stop for the second night. The park has been created solely through private funds and private labor of the last two decades. It served to rehabilitate injured marine animals found in the area as well as conduct research into sea turtles, dugongs, and other endangered species.


We were given a tour of the park by a volunteer who showed us stone fish, sea turtles, a variety of fishes, and even a few sharks that they had in a giant pond. The shaggy blob shown above is the seemingly unimpressive stone fish. The venom that the fish's dorsal spines can inject is said to be so painful that some people who have had the misfortune of being subjected to it, have amputated their own limbs in an attempt to find relief. If the shock caused by the massive onslaught of pain does not kill you outright, and you do not cut of your leg, a complete recovery can take more than a year.


After a relatively uneventful night of beers at the local pub in Denham we all got up extra early to head out to Monkey Mia (pronounced Myah) to see the dolphins. Monkey Mia is a place where several decades ago a family of dolphins started showing up and people started feeding them. This was of course a bad idea, but the highly intelligent dolphins caught on to the act and started relying almost solely on people for food. Things have of course gotten much better under professional marine biologist supervision and while the dolphins are still fed, it is only about 20% of their total daily intake.


Every morning the dolphins come into the shallow waters to be fed. Hundreds of tourist, controlled by parks officials, line the beach to take pictures and hopefully get picked to have the opportunity to feed a fish to one of the dolphins. Hey, Luck is my middle name.