Blogs
Tuesday 20th of October – Port River & Dolphin Cruise
To begin our adventured we travel down to the Port River, first we stopped off at the Garden Island public boat ramp and had a walk along the jetty, where we were lucky enough to see a dolphin swimming past us. As we were driving to and from this location along the Grand Trunkway merging into the Garden Island road I looked out of the window and observed the thousands of improperly discarded pieces of rubbish along the riverbed caught amongst the mangroves, and I could only imagine what and how this pollution is affecting not only the marine and bird life but also the natural vegetation.
We soon arrived at the doc to depart on our dolphin cruise. As we set off for many kilometres the humanisation of natural land was extremely obvious, there were cranes, building vehicles, large warehouses and many industries plotted along the embankments of the river. As we moved pass the man made city there is a small section of land that is clear of all buildings called Torrens Island (See attached picture) this is designated to preserving natural mangroves.
There are approximately 30 different species of mangroves in Australia, all of which are extremely crucial for our coastlines and estuaries. As the water level of the Port River rises and falls the mangroves move with this movement to facilitate and survive. This is a natural and sequential action however it is the governments plan to put up a barrier preventing the mangroves to move up onto the onshore surroundings, however this will cause the mangroves to drown out. The mangroves in the Port River act as habitats for birds, mammals, crustaceans and fish providing safe breeding grounds and much needed protection from the greater open ocean. As well as being a habitat mangroves also improve the water quality by filtering out pollutants, stabilising and improving the soil and protecting shorelines from erosion. Due to the choice to prevent the mangroves from migrating to shore this is one of the most detrimental issues facing the port river today.
To solve this issue there needs to be a solution that facilitates for both humans and the natural world. A suggestion that I could make to improve this issue is to revegetate the mangroves and for people who suggest putting up barriers to not to as it would be single handily killing majority of the mangroves in the Port River causing a plummeting scale of all marine and bird life. There is already a revegetation project-taking place where AMWRRO and the Australian Government are working together to plant over 500 Grey Mangrove trees on Torrens Island (more information: http://www.amwrro.org.au/about-amwrro/projects).
