Whale Watching in Moreton Bay Marine Park
Moreton Bay really put on a show for us today. Beautiful sunshine, clear glassy calm seas, and an abundance of marine life out and about! In addition to six humpback whales including a young calf, we also saw several Green, Loggerhead and Hawksbill Sea Turtles, a few inshore bottlenose dolphins and a couple of beautiful big birds of prey (Brahminy and Whistling Kites).
Moreton Bay boasts an incredible diversity of marine life, due to its location in an area of overlap between tropical and temperate zones. Warm and cold water species of flora and fauna mix in this area, making the bay and some of its reefs (like Flinders Reef off the northern end of Moreton Island) more diverse than the Great Barrier Reef in terms of numbers of species per square metre.
We are very lucky to still have substantial populations of large marine vertebrates like dugongs, turtles, dolphins etc., in the bay. This is by no means common around the world anymore, especially so close to a major urban centre (the city of Brisbane). Coastal populations of marine animals are in decline everywhere around the world, mostly due to human impacts.
That’s why Moreton Bay is protected as a marine park, but it is really up to each and every one of us to do our bit to make sure that these beautiful animals stay around for future generations to enjoy as well. Simple things we can all do to help out include boating and fishing responsibly and reducing rubbish by reusing and recycling and putting it in the bin or picking it up when we see it out in the environment.