Freycinet Marine Park is home to an abundance of butterfly perch, newly discovered black corals, diverse colourful sponge gardens and foraging seabirds. Southern right whales rest in the park while migrating. The park includes large offshore seamounts, which are believed to be too deep to have been fished. These seamounts are part of a larger chain, each one rising from the abyssal plain, continental rise or plateau situated 200 kilometres from the east coast of Tasmania. Providing hard substrate and supporting a wide variety of sessile invertebrates, these seafloor features are hotspots for productivity, biodiversity and aggregations of marine life.

The park begins offshore from Bicheno and Freycinet National Park on the east coast of Tasmania and extents eastwards to the edge of the Australian Exclusive Economic Zone. It covers 57,942 square kilometres, and has National Park, Recreational Use and Multiple Use Zones. – Parks Australia

Freycinet ranges from 43 to 5,231 metres depth, with an average depth of 4,206 metres. The majority of the Park (85%) falls within the abyssal zone (4,000-6,000 metres) [view on map]. The mapped areas of the seafloor are dominated by Plane (50%) and Apron (13%) morphological features [view on map].

Based on annotations from current publicly available seafloor imagery (Squidle+), the five most dominant seafloor categories in this Park are:

• Mesophotic: mixed invertebrate community (46%), sponges (19%), sand (17%), coral biota (7%), unidentified (5%)
• Rariphotic: sand (64%), mixed invertebrate community (16%), mixed coarse sediments (12%), sponges (3%), unidentified biota (3%)
• Upper-slope: no public imagery available
• Mid-slope: sand (>99%), consolidated hard substrata (<1%)
• Lower-slope to Abyss: no public imagery available

Read more about the Freycinet State of Knowledge (Parks Australia).