Danny's Blog on the Midwest Ecology

Along our beautiful Midwest coastline — from the Abrolhos Islands to Kalbarri — there’s a quiet shift happening beneath the ocean...

It’s easy to overlook a bird you see every day. Easier still to dismiss it. Silver Gulls - the default “seagulls” of Geraldton’s beaches - are perhaps the most misjudged creatures along the foreshore. They’re treated like scavengers of chip packets, noisy opportunists, background noise for picnics and shoreline walks.But spend a little time watching them, really watching them, and a different bird emerges. BirdLife Australia describes the Silver Gull ( Chroicocephalus novaeho

The first time you wade into Geraldton’s water with a mask on, you realise the coastline has two worlds: the one we move through on land, and the quieter, green-lit world just beneath the surface. That second world belongs to the seagrass. Offshore from Bluff Point and Sunset Beach, meadows of Posidonia  and Amphibolis  stretch across the shallow seafloor - not forests, exactly, but something close.DBCA’s marine habitat maps list these meadows as some of the most important ec

Some creatures endure the Midwest heat. Meat ants calculate  it. Walk anywhere along Geraldton’s coast or inland scrub - Drummonds, Moonyoonooka, Moresby, even the sandy edges of cul-de-sacs - and you’ll eventually find the unmistakable sign of an Iridomyrmex purpureus  colony: a low, open disc of fine, sun-bleached gravel. No towering mound. No grand castle. Just a flattened circle of stone and sand, raked clean by thousands of mandibles. CSIRO’s ant identification sheets de