The Volvo Ocean Lovers Festival took place from 15-19 March 2023 around Bondi, NSW, with performances, market stalls, film screenings, art and photography exhibitions, activities and presentations to inspire and engage the community on ocean issues and to showcase solutions and innovations that improve the health of the ocean.
I hosted the ‘Science in your Swimmers’ sessions; two days featuring more than 50 marine scientists, ocean researchers, and maritime archaeologists and conservationists sharing their knowledge, findings and passion with audiences. The youngest presenter was 12 years old, and a member of a local environmental initiative. The oldest presenter was 87, and an internationally recognised marine conservation expert.
Thousands of people experienced the Festival, learned about ocean opportunities and challenges, and engaged with speakers, performers and exhibits – from ‘Sustainable Seafood’ with Neil Perry to ‘Sharks – Good, Bad or Ugly?’ with Valerie Taylor.
What was clear in every presentation was our enormous impact on the oceans, the marine life within it and, in the words of the Gamay Rangers, our ‘sea country’. Although 87 per cent of Australians live within 50km of the coast, our pollution, our power production, our built environment, our plastics and greenhouse gas emissions have all changed ocean environments swiftly and brutally. There was certainly “good” news in between the “bad”, but the message was clear: we need to act now, and rapidly, to stand any chance of conserving marine life.
So, what did we learn over the Festival? Here are my ten favourite facts:
- Legendary shark conservationist Valerie Taylor’s favourite shark is the Grey Nurse Shark; “Grey Nurse Sharks have a wonderful set of teeth, but they’re beautiful, docile things and they’ve never bitten me”, she says, although she admitted to being bitten a few times during her diving career by other sharks. “Only five or six of more than 400 species of shark in the ocean are potentially dangerous to humans”, Valerie explained. “The Grey Nurse Shark was the first shark in the world to ever be protected”, she added, “and I’ve just gone from one thing to the next to the next to the next”. (Conservationist, photographer and filmmaker Valerie Taylor – you can watch the two-part Australian Story featuring Valerie Taylor and her work online)
- When the RMS Titanic sank in April 1912, the wreck created a new underwater habitat for organisms. One of these is a species of bacteria particular to the location, named Halomonas Titanicae after the Titanic itself, that lives inside long growths of rust called ‘rusticles’. Even at depths of 3,800 metres (12,500 feet) these bacteria eat the iron in the ship’s hull and will eventually consume the entire ship, recycling the nutrients into the surrounding ocean ecosystem. (Emily Jateff, Australian National Maritime Museum)
- Bluebottles are frequent, if unwelcome, summer visitors to our beaches. Blown by the wind, they are often blown into shallow waters and can wash up on beaches. However, the bluebottle is not a single animal but a collection of four organisms called ‘zooids’ that are dependent on one another for survival. The float (pneumatophore) is a single individual and supports the rest of the colony on the water. The tentacles (dactylozooids) are polyps that detect, sting and seize food (mostly small fish and crustaceans) and take it to the digestive polyps (gastrozooids). The fourth type of polyp (gonozooids) carry out reproductive processes. (Tian Du, University of Sydney). An extra ‘fun fact’ is that there are both ‘left-handed’ bluebottles, which drift rightwards in the wind, and ‘right-handed’ bluebottles that drift leftwards. (Dr Amandine Schaeffer, UNSW)
- Although the Paris Agreement was reached in order to pursue efforts “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels”, the East Australian Current (EAC) which flows south down Australia’s east coast has already warmed by 1.4 degrees during the last 70 years, and we are seeing considerable changes in ecologies and ecosystems because of it. Since about 50 per cent of the oxygen that we breathe comes from marine phytoplankton (compared to around 5 per cent from the Amazon Rainforest, which is often referred to as “the lungs of the world”), we need to be reversing the changes already happening in our oceans. (Professor Shauna Murray, UTS).
- Wilhelmina (“Mina”) Wylie (1891-1984) was Australia’s first female Olympic swimming representative, competing in the 1912 Summer Olympics. At a time when females weren’t permitted to compete in many sports, Mina blazed a trail for inclusion in sport. Her father, Henry Wylie, who built Wylie’s Baths in Coogee, may have been her swimming coach but because of the chauvinist attitudes of the day he was not allowed to watch her swim or see her in swimming attire out of the water without her wearing a floor-length cape. Yet despite these attitudes and hindrances, Wylie still won an Olympic Silver Medal, and Fanny Durack an Olympic Gold Medal soon after. (Grace Barnes, author of ‘In Search of Mina Wylie’)
- There is an enormous amount of work already under way to study marine life in all its forms, to understand and protect their habitats. Better known studies include the ‘SnotBot’ initiative, that uses drones with flip-top petri dishes to capture samples of whale “blow’” As whale expert and science communicator Dr Vanessa Pirotta explained, “The blow samples collected are straight from the whale’s lungs and can contain DNA, microbiomes, and other indicators of their health”. (Dr Vanessa Pirotta). At the other end of the scale, around 40 per cent of biomass in the ocean is jellyfish, and we can learn a lot about toxins and bio-accumulants from them, as well as bio-prospecting marine microbial diversity for new antimicrobial drugs and bioactives. (Associate Professor Suhelan Egan, UNSW)
- There are species of Sawfish (known as ‘Carpenter Sharks’ but actually a family of rays) that can adapt to different levels of salinity as well as freshwater, and which swim up to 400 kilometres up-river to feed and find areas with fewer predators. But all around Australia, sawfish are in trouble. “The Top End is a global ‘lifeboat’ for four of the world’s five sawfish – dwarf, green, largetooth and narrow – but even here they still face threats from fishing practices like gillnetting, water extraction from rivers to support industry, and the impacts of global heating”, said Dr Leonardo Guida of recent conservation partnerships. (Dr Leonardo Guida, Australian Marine Conservation Society)
- Around 30,000 humpback whales migrate along the east Australian coast every year, between summer feeding grounds in the Antarctic and the winter breeding and calving grounds at the Great Barrier Reef. However, different whale habitats are important at specific times during whale migrations; recent research has showed that a staggering 80 per centof the whales surveyed in Booderee (also known as Jervis Bay) on the NSW South Coast, were mothers and their calves. (Alexandra Jones, University of Sydney)
- The Gamay Rangers, who protect and conserve the sea country and land around Gamay (also known as Botany Bay) in NSW, can see first-hand the evidence of changes in water quality and temperature. “We look through middens and see there are shells from types of pipi and mussel that no longer exist around our sea country”, says Robert Cooley, senior field officer from the Gamay Rangers. “They just no longer live here.” (Robert Cooley, Gamay Rangers) And Kataya Barrett, saltwater and planning project officer from Country Needs People, has been speaking with Indigenous peoples of all ages to collect stories and recollections of where species were once found, and which habitats were unique, to try and protect and conserve them over time. Australia’s 25 Indigenous Protected Areas include management of coastline and sea country, and ranger groups undertake sea country management activities such as marine patrols, collecting discarded nets and debris, and turtle and dugong monitoring. (Kataya Barrett, Country Needs People).
- Some good news: Extraordinary initiatives are happening all around us to try and repair some of the damage. Professor Adriana Verges from UNSW told us about Operation Crayweed, an initiative reversing the damage to the seagrass forests that once stretched along our coastline providing habitats for fish, abalone, crayfish and broader marine biodiversity. Phyllospora comosa, or crayweed, is a type of temperate seaweed forest that provides habitats for marine species, produces oxygen and captures atmospheric carbon. Crayweed can be male or female and their sexually produced babies then attach to the reef, forming a new, self-sustaining and expanding population. By attaching patches of transplanted crayweed onto reefs, Operation Crayweed can restore whole forests across an entire site. And John Sear, a CoralWatch Ambassador, told us of further ‘Citizen Science’ initiatives that aim to engage swimmers, snorkelers and divers in the monitoring and recording of local coral species, and of the new corals that are being discovered. You may have already heard of the “seahorse hotels” that are being introduced as part of Operation Posidonia to help valuable habitats recover and reintroduce seahorse species.
The thousands of visitors and attendees to the Volvo Ocean Lovers Festival found the range of sessions and activities fun, fascinating and inspiring. But as Professor Rob Harcourt, honorary professor of marine ecology at Macquarie University summarised so eloquently, “We all need to do something to protect our oceans. Right now. And first and foremost, stop funding the problem [through your bank or super] and start supporting the solutions.”