Oyster Harbour

	Oyster Harbour at a glance
	Average annual catchment rainfall:		1100 millimetres
	Harbour area:		15.6 square kilometres

      

The harbour is a permanently open estuary, with a mainly shallow basin, but it does go as deep as five metres, and is used to shelter a fishing fleet carrying out commercial fishing and farming oysters and mussels.

The habitat value is very high, with extensive mudflats, seagrass beds, fringing forests, sedgelands and saltmarsh, although little of this habitat has been reserved for conservation. Oyster Harbour is used by thousands of waterbirds for feeding, and is the only known habitat of the bivalve mollusc Anadara trapezia in Western Australia.

Oyster Harbour has undergone a major loss of seagrass beds over the last decade. This has been caused by the smothering effect of excessive algae growth, sustained by the huge quantity of nutrients that are washed into the Harbour each winter from the fertilised catchments of the Kalgan and King Rivers.

Further Information:

Albany Waterways Resource Book: Water and Rivers Commission 1999

South Coast Regional Land and Water Care Strategy: The Albany Hinterland Sub-region. Prepared by the South Coast Regional Assessment Panel and the South Coast Regional Initiative Planning Team: December 1996