This Wacky Wildlife post highlights the history and underwater wonders we encountered in June 2024 at Lady Elliot Island in the Great Barrier Reef. It was a life-changing adventure, and one of the best trips of my life! For an overview of our family trip to Oceania and ecological history, please see my previous wacky wildlife post.
Jump to:
- Lady Elliot Island history and reef ecology
- Highlights video
- Photos and fun facts on wacky underwater wildlife
- Humpback whales!!
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.
Highlights video of wacky underwater 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!
Photos of wacky underwater wildlife
Humpback whales!!
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.
Looking back on this epic adventure, I feel so grateful and fortunate to have the opportunity to loop back and live out my childhood dream to visit the Great Barrier Reef. I hope that these photos and videos give you a sense of how wacky, wild and wondrous reef life is on the spinning blue ball we live on together.