Jurien Bay Survey Trip, WA 28-30th Nov

In November, the RLS crew ventured over to the west coast for a survey trip at Jurien Bay, WA.

For those of you that don’t know, Jurien Bay is approximately 3 hours north of Perth and is famous for its wild winds and western rock lobsters! 6 new trainees were inducted into the Reef Life Survey crew including Marjon Phur and Cheryl Petty – dive buddies from Perth, and a group from the environmental consulting company, Oceanica, Spencer Shute, Lotte Rivers, Karen Crawley, and Allison Henss. Emma Richardson, who was helping us out on another monitoring project which coincided with the trip, also joined in for a day. Trained RLS guns Paul Day, Kevin Smith, Wendy Hutchison, and Russ Stevens also ventured up north to join us!

A normal day in Jurien Bay usually sees big swells, low vis, and strong westerly winds. Fortunately for us, the weekend brought clear skies, calm waters and relatively good vis! Overall, 65 different species of fish and 76 different species of invertebrates were recorded during the three day weekend. 5 ‘Dhuies’ (Glaucosoma hebraicum) were spotted over the weekend, the largest seen by Paul was about 60cm. The West Australian dhufish (G. hebraicum) is endemic to Western Australia and is in decline due to heavy commercial and recreational fishing pressures, so we made sure we kept the location of these little fellas a secret! WA definitely wins the prize for having the biggest dusky morwong (Dactylophora nigricans) Gedgar spotted one which came in at a whopping 1.25 m. Unfortunately no one was able to spot an elusive Harlequin fish, but lined dottybacks (Labracinus lineatus) and western blue devils (Paraplesiops meleagris) were sighted by most. From the invert perspective the short spined urchins (Amblypneustes spp. and Holopneustes spp.) had everyone guessing. Ali’s keen eye for intersting inverts spotted her a cool nudi (Chromodoris roboi, see pic), and almost everyone came away with that postcard pic of a Western Australian Chromodorid (Chromodoris westralensis) sitting in a Demospongid. Emma even spotted a small turtle during one of the surveys!

The weekend proved to be a great success with 35 surveys completed over 6 sites. A big thanks must go to all who attended, your efforts and dedication are hugely appreciated. We were also lucky enough to have the expertise of Ian Stiles and his crew from Hot Tuna. The Jurien Dive team at Jurien Bay were brilliant and went out of their way to help us survey all of our required sites. Huge thanks to Ian Stiles and crew for all their efforts, and especially for those long afternoons spent filling tanks!