The diverse underwater landscape of Western Eyre Marine Park features canyons, ancient coastline and stretches of continental shelf break. These features drive nutrient-rich upwellings and eddies, creating areas of high biological productivity which provide rich foraging grounds for a range of species including the Australian sea lion, sperm whale, white shark and small pelagic fish communities. The seafloor also supports some of the world’s most diverse soft-sediment ecosystems that teem with rich invertebrate life.

Western Eyre Marine Park is adjacent to Murat Marine Park and three South Australian marine parks including Nuyts Archipelago, West Coast Bays and Investigator. Together these marine parks connect coastal and offshore environments across state and Commonwealth waters and provide protection for a range of habitats and connected ecosystems.

The marine park is about 30 kilometres west of Streaky Bay, South Australia, and extends south to the edge of Australia’s Exclusive Economic Zone. It covers 57,944 square kilometres, and has National Park, Multiple Use, Special Purpose and Special Purpose (Trawl) zones. – Parks Australia

Western Eyre ranges from 18 to 5,756 metres depth, with an average depth of 2,514 metres. The majority of the park (37%) falls within the abyssal zone (4,000-6,000 metres) [view on map]. The mapped areas of the seafloor are dominated by Slope (33%) and Plain (27%) morphological features [view on map].

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

• Shallow to Mesophotic: no public imagery available
• Rariphotic: sand (89%), sponges (4%), non-coral cnidaria (3%), bryozoans (1%), consolidated hard substrata (1%)
• Upper-slope to Abyss: no public imagery available