By Liam Mannix
The crashing of the breakers. The sun’s glare coming off the deep blue ocean. The stink of salt and rotting seaweed. As Australians, beaches are our great natural inheritance.
Few know them better than Thomas Schlacher, who over the past 20 years has become one of Australia’s foremost beach scientists.
A sunny day at Dendy Beach, Brighton.Credit: Penny Stephens
Professor Schlacher, director of the University of the Sunshine Coast’s Animal Research Centre, is a beach romantic. His academic papers begin with Shakespearean sonnets and are illustrated with paintings of the coastline by 17th-century artist Salvatore Rosa.
But the more Schlacher has learnt about the beach and the extraordinary life it supports, the sadder his visits to the coast have become. “It is easy,” he says, “to feel depressed.”
He says councils raking beaches clean every morning and permitting four-wheel-drives along others is harming our precious coastline and the ecosystems reliant on it.
To the untrained eye, beaches look like long stretches of desert and the dominant lifeforms are sunbathers and seagulls.
Crowds enjoy the sun at St Kilda beach on Australia Day 2022.Credit: Paul Jeffers
But Schlacher’s great insight developed as he strolled along the sand, watching raptors circling high above.
What were the birds waiting for? Fish. Schlacher watched as fish after fish was washed up by the ocean tides; and the birds were on them in a second.
Thomas Schlacher, director of the University of the Sunshine Coast’s Animal Research Centre.Credit: AMSA
Schlacher and his colleagues had spent decades studying the beach by taking samples of sand. But what if, he thought as he watched the birds with their bounty, the key to understanding the beach wasn’t what was there, but what was being taken away?
Schlacher and his team set up hidden cameras at beaches across Australia. The cameras revealed beaches were the foundation of sprawling food webs.
The ocean is so rich with life and so much washes up on beaches, Schlacher says. That feeds sea eagles, whistling kites, dingoes, Tasmanian devils and even lace monitors.
Far more food was being taken from the beach than from areas a few hundred metres inland, Schlacher and his team found.
“The rate of consumption on the beach is extraordinary. You put a fish there and it’s usually gone in minutes, and that’s why you don’t find many fish on the beach,” he says.
It’s not just scavengers. Tumbleweed seeds from the dunes attract large flocks of parrots.
A four-wheel-drive on Queensland’s Fraser Island.Credit: iStock
And then there’s the sand itself. It acts as a water filter, taking organic matter out of the sea.
“Without beaches, our ocean would be less blue in many parts,” Schlacher says.
The organic matter supports yet another ecosystem: algae, worms, clams and crustaceans, who all work to keep the sand clean.
“Otherwise it would be one stinking black mess,” he says.
Associate Professor Melanie Bishop, a coastal ecologist at Macquarie University, says “there are more different groups of organisms living on a beach than in the world’s rainforests”.
But this revelation has only served to weigh down Schlacher, who is acutely aware of how much damage we are doing to our beaches.
“They are extremely under threat,” he says. “If we were to treat any other ecosystem in the sea as we do beaches, people would say, ‘Are you barking mad?’ Imagine driving a car on the Great Barrier Reef!”
He says four-wheel drives kill the small animals and microorganisms living in the sand.
“We have natural parks, but they are literally getting pummelled to death by having thousands of four-by-fours going up and down the beach, killing everything in sight,” Schlacher says.
He says Australia does not take enough steps to protect beaches and the ecosystems they support.
Victoria bans driving on beaches but other states allow it, even in some national parks.
Many councils spend huge amounts of money cleaning beaches by getting rid of deposited seaweed and raking the sand.
“That’s terrible. That’s a very, very bad idea,” Schlacher says.
“All the food web relies on the food that washes up. The moment you take it away, you kill the food web at its very base, you cut off its legs.”
Schlacher is not the sort of scientist who wants to see all nature locked up and unreachable.
He says he would accept the swept-clean urban beach if only we did a better job protecting beaches in national parks.
If more people understood how important beaches are, we might take better care of them, Schlacher believes. And a bit of care may be all they need.
“Beaches heal themselves,” he says, “if we give them a chance.”
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correction
An earlier version of this article incorrectly described Professor Schlacher as German. This is incorrect - he is Austrian. It also neglected to include his full title - he is a professor.