The Gathaagudu Animal Tracking (GAT) Project is a collaborative research program investigating the movement ecology of marine megafauna in the Shark Bay World Heritage Area (Gathaagudu), Western Australia. The GAT Project is conducted in close partnership with the Malgana Traditional Owners, the custodians of Gathaagudu. Situated in one of the world’s most ecologically significant and climate-sensitive seascapes, the project applies multi-species tracking to better understand ecosystem connectivity, behavioural responses to environmental change, and implications for conservation and management.
Between 2021 and 2025, the GAT Project has deployed satellite and acoustic tags across multiple marine megafauna taxa, including on culturally significant species such as green turtles and dugongs, but also loggerhead turtles and tiger sharks. The main aim was to capture movement patterns that span fine-scale habitat use to broad regional migrations that connect Shark Bay with the wider Australian coastline. This integrated, ecosystem-scale approach enables comparison of behavioural strategies across trophic levels and provides key insights into predator–prey dynamics, habitat connectivity, and responses to seagrass loss and marine heatwaves.
The project functioned as a training platform for early‑career researchers, supporting a diverse portfolio of Honours, MSc, and PhD student projects. These student-led studies span behavioural ecology, habitat modelling, genomics, eDNA, and trophic ecology, demonstrating how coordinated tracking infrastructure can generate high-impact outcomes across disciplines while building research capacity, government connections, and indigenous partnerships.
By bringing together Malgana Traditional Owners, conservation managers, scientists, and students, the project demonstrates how connecting cultural and scientific knowledge can deliver inclusive, ecosystem‑scale insights that are essential for responding to mounting pressures on Australia’s marine environments.