Natural Beauty
Shark Bay is renowned for its breathtaking scenery. It is a place of colour and texture, drama and peace: of pure white beaches and rich red sand dunes, shallow bays and plunging cliffs.

Shark Bay’s vast seagrass meadows pattern the aquamarine waters with dark dapples, ripples and swirls. The coasts are peppered by rocky islands and fringed with sweeping beaches of glittering sand and shells. The spectacular rolling red sands of the Peron Peninsula, interspersed by oddly shaped claypans called birridas, create a dramatic backdrop to the surrounding seas. Closer to the coast, some birridas have been inundated with seawater, forming tranquil turquoise lagoons.

Ecological Process
Shark Bay is a place where it is possible to see evolution in action. This includes not only the development of different plant and animal communities, but also an entire marine ecosystem!

Shark Bay is the transition zone between major ecological provinces, marine and terrestrial, and has a high number of endemic species and others at the limit of their range. Living at the extreme, these plants and animals have stretched their survival capabilities to adapt to their environment. Shark Bay’s isolation means some animals and plants have evolved into distinct subspecies of species found in other parts of Australia. These ongoing ecological processes are important for the scientific study of species distribution, adaptation, diversity and abundance.

Biological Diversity
Shark Bay is a refuge for numerous rare and threatened plants and animals. Largely spared the habitat destruction and introduced predators that wreaked havoc on mainland Australia, it is the last stronghold for five critically endangered mammals – four of which occur in the wild nowhere else on Earth. Shark Bay’s sheltered coves and lush seagrass beds are a haven for vulnerable animals such as the humpback whale and green turtle. The world’s largest dugong population grazes in its sheltered waters, and it is one of Australia’s most important nesting areas for the endangered loggerhead turtle.

Earths History
Shark Bay is home to a community of life forms representing a major stage in Earth’s history. They are Stromatolites, rock-like structures built by single-celled cyanobacteria. Shark Bay’s Stromatolites are similar to life forms found on Earth up to 3.5 billion years ago! Hamelin Pool in Shark Bay has the most diverse and abundant examples of living marine Stromatolites in the world.

For 2.9 billion years microbes were the only life on Earth. They modified the Earth’s atmosphere by producing oxygen, developed the ability to respire oxygen, emerged from the sea to colonise the land, and evolved most of the survival techniques used by life on Earth today. The only present day evidence of their activities can be found in fossilised stromatolites which have preserved the biology of these unique organisms and shows what the environment was like when they were alive. Shark Bay’s stromatolites are ‘living fossils’, providing a unique, modern-day insight into the nature and evolution of Earth’s biosphere, and the history of life on Earth.