This Wacky Wildlife post highlights the awesome non-avian animals my family and I encountered on our trip to the Great Barrier Reef, southern Queensland, Australia and Kaikōura in the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand from June to July 2024. My kid and I are working on a separate dedicated bird-focused post and hope to share it with you in early 2025.
Jump to:
- trip overview
- ecological history of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand
- Lady Elliot Island history and reef ecology
- photos and videos of wacky wildlife!
Trip overview
Below are the locations where we took the photos and videos featured in this post. We chose our trip locations for their accessibility (for walking, taking public transit, and rental car driving) and ability to see wildlife.
Australia locations:
- Lady Elliot Island in the southern Great Barrier Reef
- K’gari (Fraser Island), the world’s largest sand island
- Noosa National Park on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast
- Mary Cairncross Scenic Reserve in the Hinterlands
- Brisbane, capital city of Queensland
Aotearoa New Zealand locations:
We’ll feature more NZ locations in our next Wacky Wildlife post on birds!
Ecological history and biodiversity of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand
Australia is considered one of the 17 megadiverse countries in the world by the UN Environment Programme, which means it has high biological diversity as determined by the number of species unique to it as a single country. We focused our month-long trip on a tiny biodiverse area of southern Queensland, on the Eastern coast of Australia, from the Great Barrier Reef’s Lady Elliot Island and Sunshine Coast down to Brisbane.
Oceania has a fascinating ecological history. This region of our planet broke off from the supercontinent Pangea 180 million years ago as part of Gondwana, then separated from India and Antarctica 80 million years ago. Around that time, volcanic activity led Zealandia, along the outer edge of Gondwana, to break off and move into the Pacific Ocean, much of it getting submerged. The part of Zealandia that pushed against the Pacific tectonic plate rose up over the past 5 million years, forming present-day Aotearoa New Zealand. After Australia became isolated 80 million years ago, megafauna evolved, such as hippo-sized 6,000-pound wombats, 10-feet-tall flightless birds, marsupial lions, and sheep-sized echidnas. Aotearoa New Zealand, geographically isolated for 55 million years, became a haven for birds and other plants adept at crossing large oceanic barriers, settling in this unique predator-free land and evolving with NZ’s dynamic ecology into many species of flightless birds.
The first humans came to Australia about 50-to-80,000 years ago from Southeast Asia, a major achievement in sea-crossing. Early Aboriginal Australians dispersed around the northern and southern coastal regions and the desert central region, forming more than 400 distinct languages and a huge diversity of cultural practices. Dreaming stories, containing Aboriginal oral histories, teachings and philosophies, tell stories of megafauna. For example, the Adnyamathanha story of the big scary Yamuti is told to protect children, and perhaps comes from the time people lived alongside Diprotodon, the largest marsupial to have existed and went extinct along with Australia’s other megafauna about 40,000 years ago. Tens of thousands of years later, the arrival of Europeans in the 1700s resulted in massive land development, disease, and the pillaging of lumbar and other natural resources, which has only accelerated in the past 60 years. Human settlement and climate change has led to the loss of 40% of Australia’s forests and rapid extinctions of many of these unique species.
In Aotearoa New Zealand, the impact of European settlement is even more visibly stark, with about 65% of New Zealand’s forests cleared and 90% of its wetlands drained. Aotearoa New Zealand was the last habitable land mass settled by humans, with the ancestors of Māori arriving from other Pacific islands about 750 years ago. European sealers, whalers, traders and missionaries started arriving about 250 years ago. The 1840 Treaty of Waitangi established British law and government. The British representatives described the treaty promising Māori land rights, but in practice, much of Māori land was confiscated or sold to British settlers. This led to warfare in the 1840s and 1860s as Māori defended their lands and local authority. NZ’s native animals also suffered, with half of NZ’s endemic species becoming extinct since humans first arrived.
It’s hard not to feel down about the loss of the wondrous biodiversity of these regions, especially while we were ironically driving our rental car down the denuded hills and coasts of Aotearoa New Zealand. It looked like we were in rural UK with all the sheep and cattle pastures around. We had to go to dedicated predator-free eco-sanctuaries such as Zealandia Te Māra a Tāne in Wellington, Orokonui Ecosanctuary in the Otago Peninsula, and Ulva Island/Te Wharawhara off the southern tip to see native flora and fauna. We saw so few non-avian endemic land species in New Zealand, that the only animals I could include from our trip for this post were whales and dolphins I saw off the coast of Kaikōura with the excellent, Maori-owned and run Whale Watch Kaikōura. While we cannot recover the amazing creatures that are now extinct, I am heartened by the hopeful and helpful humans working hard to protect the magical places, flora and fauna that are left.
Lady Elliot Island in the southern Great Barrier Reef
Lady Elliot Island is a tiny 100-acre coral island at the southern end of the Great Barrier Reef. It rose above sea level about 3,500 years ago and has been an important nesting and feeding rest stop for migratory seabirds. Bird droppings (guano) provided the nutrients and seeds for lush vegetation to grow, which in turn fed and sheltered them. While there are no known records of Aboriginal people living on the island, the surrounding areas are home to Taribelang Bunda, Bailai, Gooreng Gooreng, and Gu rang Aboriginal communities.
In the early 1800s Asian sea farmers found and harvested the sea cucumbers in the surrounding waters until they were depleted. In the 1860s European miners arrived and brought with them 30 Chinese and Malay workers to strip the island of the guano for use as fertilizer and gunpowder. They also removed nearly all the vegetation, leaving only 8 pisonia trees where the head miner lived. The first lighthouse in Australia was built on the island in 1866. Until tourism and revegetation began in 1969, the island was barren, as you can see in the photo above. The island became an eco-resort in 2005, and efforts to restore native vegetation, reef and nesting areas have made it into a lush coral island again.
Our 5-day stay on Lady Elliot Island was our favorite place out of the 11 places we stayed during our 2-month adventure in Oceania. From the breathtaking views during our flight there on a tiny 8-person plane (where our woman pilot let our kid be her co-pilot!), swimming with sea turtles, reef fish and mantas, watching nesting tropicbirds and humpback whales migrating through, to the passionate biologist guides, comfortable and luxurious accommodations (we stayed in a reef room) and most surprisingly, the delicious and diverse gourmet food prepared fresh for us every meal… The whole experience was amazing and unforgettable.
Even with the sparkling sheen of the “resort” part of Lady Elliot’s eco-resort, the impacts of climate change and human development were still obvious. In February-March 2024, the southern Great Barrier Reef, including the reef around Lady Elliot Island, experienced a massive heat wave that led to about 60% of the reef being bleached. Bleaching occurs when symbiotic algae (zooxanthellae) become overwhelmed by abnormal temperatures, light or pollution, which causes them to produce reactive oxygen species and in turn damages coral tissue. The coral expels the algae to reduce further damage, but in doing so the coral loses its main food source. If temperatures return to normal within a few days, the algae often come back and repopulate the coral. But if the high temperatures and bright light exposure are prolonged, some coral species will not recover from the bleaching event. Corals are a diverse species, and some (e.g. branching corals) can only survive 10 days without their algae while larger corals can survive for weeks feeding on plankton.
We saw the impacts of the bleaching event 3-4 months later while snorkeling and on reef walks. While we were there, a marine biology team was doing a survey on the reef recovery status. Our biologist guides were reluctant to talk much about the bleaching; I imagine it was a combination of sadness about it as well as not wanting to “ruin” our holidays. But having seen healthy parts of the Mesoamerican reef, I could tell there had been substantial bleaching. Parts of many branching corals were white and pale, likely dead. Some of the larger corals appeared to be recovering with brownish algae starting to repopulate parts of them. It can take years for coral to recover. Even so, we were still enchanted by a reef that was still full of color and life, including some spectacularly resilient corals like the brain coral pictured below.
Wacky wildlife!
Here is my Great Barrier Reef highlights video with more info and photos about specific species below. I used an Olympus Tough TG-5 camera to take the underwater photos and videos.
Wildlife featured in this video:
- 0:11 – Sea cucumbers are echinoderms, like starfish and sea urchins. They eat ocean floor sediment and poop it out, releasing rich nitrogen nutrients for algae and corals and aerating it so small crabs, worms and other creatures can live in it. They have made a comeback at Lady Elliot Island after getting completely wiped out by people harvesting them in the 1800s.
- 0:12 and 1:48 – Blue-green chromis: the first time stamp shows baby chromis feeding near shallow lagoon coral and the second time stamp shows a massive group of adults in deeper waters.
- 0:17 – Parrotfish have powerful “beaks” made of 15 rows of 1,000 teeth fused together which chomp on coral for algae and polyps. A single parrotfish can expel hundreds of pounds of sand a year, creating the gorgeous white sand on reef beaches. Some parrotfish go through protogynous hermaphroditism, changing from female to male and changing their colors in the process.
- 0:24 – Cornetfish are usually solitary hunters but here we saw a large group in the shallow reef.
- 0:34 – Green sea turtles delighted us each time we got into the water, checking us out and swimming with us.
- 0:58 – Manta rays in a courtship train led by Romulus, an intersex manta ray! Lady Elliot Island’s Project Manta identifies and tracks individual manta rays to study their behavior and ecology and to advance marine conservation efforts.
- 1:14 – Reef sharks are a vulnerable species, threatened by overfishing, warming and acidifying waters, and coastal development. These sharks are generally timid and avoid humans, feeding on small fish, cephalopods such as squid and crustaceans such as shrimp.
- 1:26 – Cuttlefish are usually solitary creatures, but we encountered an unusually large group of them. They lined up and stared at me as I watched them, hovering for a long while, as if to communicate something. The first two were large and pale while the remaining cuttlefish were deep red-purple. Perhaps they were migrating from their shallow reef nursery grounds to deeper waters and used their numbers for safety, forming a defensive watch line when they encountered us humans.
- 1:53 – Convict (!) tang (or surgeonfish), like Dory, a blue tang from Finding Nemo, are algae eaters. They are also called surgeonfish for the sharp spines on their caudal (tail) fins.
- 1:57 – Reef octopus swimming, shape-shifting and mating (!): if you want to learn more, click here to read about my octopus encounter and watch the full-length video. I fell in love with cephalopods on this trip!
Humpback whales were migrating through the Southern Great Barrier Reef, and I saw a dozen or so from the shore on Lady Elliot Island, and many more while we were on K’gari. We could only spot their spouts and occasional bodies and fins from a great distance, so they were barely noticeable in the many photos and videos I took. The video above was taken along the southern end of Lady Elliot Island and shows a humpback whale spout (or blow) as they exhale; a second whale spouts shortly after. The buoys and flags mark the snorkeling boundaries. Imagine if we were in the water while those two whales swam by! Some lucky snorkelers and divers did indeed have that experience the next day. It was just amazing to know these magnificent creatures were so close to us.
K’gari (Fraser Island)
K’gari, also known as Fraser Island, is the largest sand island in the world. Sand has been blowing north to this area of Queensland for the past 2 million years, with some dunes on the island more than 700,000 years old. This unique geology makes for some beautiful freshwater lakes and interesting plants and microclimates around the island. For at least 5,000 years and as many as 50,000 years, Butchulla people have lived on K’gari and have made it a place of great natural, spiritual and social significance. I had the good fortune of meeting Butchulla artist and elder Conway Burns and buy some of his art at the K’gari Cultural Tours shop in RIver Heads, Hervey Bay, where we took the ferry to and from K’gari.
Wongari (dingoes) are wild dogs descended from East Asian dogs and wolves, brought to Australia 4,000-8,000 years ago by Asian seafarers. They were likely brought to K’gari by the Butchulla people around 5,000 years ago, and due to K’gari’s isolation from the Australian mainland, they are thought to be more “wild” and “ancient” because they are less interbred with domestic dogs. They will attack small humans, especially if they are hungry, so we stayed far away from them as advised. This young female wongari happened to walk right past our tour group and was quite wary of our big group.
Noosa National Park on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast
Towards the Sunshine Beach side of the gorgeous Noosa National Park coastal walk, we saw some rustling in the grasses and saw an echidna!! We hung out for a while watching this little one snuffle and dig around the rocks and debris.
Mary Cairncross Scenic Reserve in the Hinterlands
On our way from Noosa to Brisbane, we stopped to check out the Glass Mountains and Mary Cairncross Scenic Reserve in the Hinterlands, a subtropical rainforest habitat that covered the Blackall Range before human development. The land was set aside as a reserve by three sisters presumably from one of the farming families of the area who named the reserve after their mother Mary.
Brisbane, capital city of Queensland
I loved visiting Brisbane. It was more diverse and green than I expected, especially for a big city of nearly 3 million people. We had a great time there exploring all the food, arts and culture. There are a ton of free, beautiful and well-curated museums and clean, safe, well-maintained public parks. Even the city center parks such as the Brisbane Botanic Gardens Mount Coot-tha had tons of native birds and… flying foxes!!!
Kaikōura
Kaikōura is a chill coastal town and marine biodiversity hotspot on the northeastern coast of Aotearoa New Zealand’s South Island. We flew into Wellington from Brisbane, then took a ferry down to Picton, rented a car and drove to Kaikōura. Below I highlight the Hector’s dolphins and sperm whale I saw on my phenomenal Whale Watch Kaikōura half-day boat trip in July 2024. In our next Wacky Wildlife post, we will feature the amazing seabirds that my kid and partner saw on their Albatross Encounter boat trip.
Hector’s dolphins are among the smallest and rarest dolphins in the world, found only in the waters off Aotearoa New Zealand’s South Island and measuring about 1.8 meters (a bit less than 6 feet) at full size. Their Māori name is Tutumairekurai, or “special ocean dweller.” They primarily feed on fish and squid. Hector’s dolphins are considered a nationally vulnerable species, as they have to compete with human overfishing, boat strikes, oil and gas mining, toxoplasmosis and other diseases. They live in same-gender social groups of about 14. It was a rare privilege to get to see this group playing and swimming in Kaikōura Canyon. At the end of the video you can see albatrosses flying over the dolphin pod with the mountains behind them.
Lazarus is a young male sperm whale who feeds in the uniquely rich, deep waters of Kaikōura Canyon. Sperm whales can dive to depths of over 3km and hold their breaths for up to 2 hours to feed on squid, sharks and fish. I had the good fortune of being on a wonderful Whale Watch Kaikōura boat in July 2024 that spotted him surfacing to breathe and dive back down.
To end this epic post, I just want to say Wowzas. Revisiting and researching more about these wacky, wonderful, wild creatures made me appreciate them all the more. It also reminds me why being in nature and being open to wonder and awe is a universal medicine. We look forward to sharing our bird encounters in our next Wacky Wildlife post.