Nature Notes: The Mangroves That Weren’t There

I went looking for mangroves today.

Some documents had suggested a small outpost of Avicennia marina once clung to the edges of the Point Moore peninsula - one of the southernmost mangrove presences along Western Australia’s coast. A 2014 coastal hazard assessment identified “mangroves at the edges of the peninsula” as part of the local ecological system (WA Department of Transport, Assessment of Coastal Erosion Hotspots in Western Australia, Appendix D).

But when I walked the shoreline in 2025, there were no mangroves to be found.

View of the coastline, close to where the mangroves stand was reported.

The beach was narrower than memory suggested. The waterline felt higher. The old Sea Rescue building - gone. The coastline itself looked rearranged, as if pushed and pulled by forces that rarely ask permission. These changes aren’t imagined. Point Moore is listed as a recognised erosion hotspot, with reports noting significant shoreline retreat, sediment movement, and coastal instability over the last decade (WA Department of Transport & City of Greater Geraldton, 2014–2020).

The spot where Sea Rescue used to sit.

A local man Danny who has lived at the point since 2002 told me he’d never seen mangroves here. Not once. If that small stand existed into the early 2000s, it must have vanished quietly - erased by storms, coastal engineering, or the slow abrasion of an exposed shoreline. Cyclone Seroja in 2021 delivered record storm surge across Geraldton, and large-scale coastal works at Beresford in preceding years altered sediment flow patterns all along the coast. In low-energy environments, mangroves survive. In shifting ones, they don’t.

Local man Danny enjoying the gifts of Geraldtons winds.

The Grey Mangrove, Avicennia marina, is native to the Geraldton Sandplains bioregion and thrives in sheltered tidal pockets where it can breathe through its pencil-thin pneumatophores (DBCA Florabase, species profile).Point Moore no longer offers those pockets - if it ever reliably did.

There is something quietly haunting about going out in search of a species and finding only absence. Not a grand, dramatic disappearance - just the soft erasure of a tiny ecosystem at the margins. A stand small enough that its loss leaves barely a whisper in the sand.

Seabird enjoying the afternoon.

Maybe the mangroves lived here once.

Maybe they hovered at the edge of possibility.

Maybe they disappeared long before we thought to check.

But walking along the weather-stripped shoreline, wind cutting across the limestone point, one truth settled in easily:

Coasts move.

Landscapes change.

And the smallest ecosystems vanish long before the maps do.

Sometimes nature teaches through what isn’t there.