If Whyalla’s cuttlefish disappear, there’s no bringing them back

Extinction is what lies before us – not necessarily of a species, but of a truly unique natural phenomenon in the Northern Spencer Gulf, writes ecologist Greg Taylor.

Giant Australian cuttlefish are found across Australia’s southern coasts, from Western Australia to New South Wales. Just one population forms a breeding aggregation: that in the Northern Spencer Gulf.

This population does not interbreed with others, and breeds only at a single, 64 hectare reef near Whyalla. If this population disappears, so, too, will the world’s only giant cuttlefish breeding aggregation.

The above information is essential knowledge if the population’s current precarity is to be fully appreciated. Before this year – and before the arrival of Australia’s worst algal bloom on record – the Northern Spencer Gulf population of the giant Australian cuttlefish reached its lowest level in 2013, when 13,500 individuals arrived at Whyalla to breed.

At the time, it was a worryingly low number. Normally, the breeding aggregation consists of many tens of thousands, and often hundreds of thousands, of individuals.

This year, an estimated 50 have returned. Not 50,000. Just 50.

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