William Dampier was not a typical pirate.
During the looting, the curious British sailor recorded the local wildlife in detail on his journey around the world, and even collected some plants, some of which are still preserved today.
His travel journal provided valuable information to future scientists such as Charles Darwin and even inspired Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's travels.
In 1699, on a trip to the westernmost tip of Australia, he stumbled upon a basin rich in sharks.
Named after Dampier, Shark Bay is home to 28 different species, from the famous tiger shark to the timid and nervous shark.
Dampier had little idea that the area would become world-famous, but it wasn't because of the sharks there.
Shark Bay is home to the largest and richest seagrass beds in the world and is home to some of the oldest life forms on Earth.
A medium-resolution imaging spectrometer on a NASA satellite captured the natural color image of the area above on September 30, 2020.
Shark Bay's waters, islands and peninsulas cover an area of more than 23,000 square kilometres.
These underwater meadows cover an area of 4,800 square kilometers and include 12 of the 60 known species of seagrass in the world.
They grow in waters close to the coast, where they are protected from strong ocean currents and receive a lot of sunlight to grow.
Scientists estimate that about 8 million tons of leaf material grow on grass each year.
Woolamel Seagrass Shore is the largest seagrass shore in the world, covering an area of 1,000 square kilometers and stretching 130 kilometers along the eastern coastline of Shark Bay.
Lush seagrass meadows help feed and sustain a wide variety of animals.
Notably, Shark Bay supports more than 10,000 dugongs — which Dampier describes as sharks with hippos in their mouths — making up about 10 percent of the world's dugong population.
This bay is also home to endangered green and spotted sea turtles.
Perhaps the most interesting life in this area is the oldest and smallest.
There is a large amount of laminated stone deposits along the coast around Shark Bay – layered rocks that form when microbes capture particles and form sediments.
The stromatolites found here are among the most diverse in the world, and researchers studied their sediments to understand what marine ecosystems looked like 3 billion years ago.
Most of the stromatolites of Shark Bay are located on the shoals of Hameling Pond on the east coast of the basin.
The shallow pool is ideal for stromatolite because it has about twice as much salinity as the ocean.
A high-salt environment is the result of a combination of factors.
Sand and seagrass embankments make it difficult for water to flow through the area and trap it in pools.
Low rainfall and high evaporation rates absorb the water, creating an increasingly salty basin.
Since few plants and animals can survive in such conditions, the nearby microbial community has less competition for resources and fewer predators, which allows them to thrive, creating an abundance of stromatolites.