The Life of Leeuwin
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THE OCEAN BENEATH Busselton Jetty, a 220km drive south of Perth, ripples with life. Vibrantly coloured nudibranchs, sponges, bryozoans, ascidians and other invertebrates cover every available centimetre of wood piling, creating a submerged forest-like habitat that extends up to 8m under water and teems with fish.
Despite Busselton being well within temperate latitudes, many of the more than 300 different marine species found at the jetty are tropical. These include stunning soft corals that are mostly found much further north in deeper water. This astounding assemblage, and the reason so many tropical species survive here, is due to the Leeuwin Current.
The Leeuwin is one of four major currents influencing life and climate in Australia. It starts as a great flow of warm water that pushes south from Indonesia along the edge of Western Australia’s continental shelf, sending huge swirling eddies into coastal waters and out to sea.
This remarkable force of nature then continues all the way down the west coast, before rounding Cape Leeuwin and continuing into the Great Australian Bight, its influence extending as far as Tasmania.
About 60,000 visitors flock to the jetty each year, largely for the spectacular array of life it supports and that can be viewed through the glass windows of the site’s underwater observatory, one of only five in the world. The current manager of this facility, Sophie Teede, can recall being overwhelmed as a little girl by the marine life at the site. “I grew up in the goldfields and have fond holiday memories of riding the little train along the jetty in a carriage with my two brothers,” she says. “To end up working here doing marine science is something I’m very passionate about.”
Visitors to the observatory descend a dramatic stairway that passes through four different viewing levels, eventually arriving at the sea floor. At each level there are large acrylic windows through which
