A crowdfunding campaign is seeking support to bring the underwater magic of Rapid Bay to the world, via a live-streamed underwater camera.

Adelaide-based Australian Ocean Laboratory (AusOcean), an environmental non-profit organisation, is behind a push to develop the camera which would capture the unique marine flora and fauna living around the old Rapid Bay jetty to viewers anywhere. 

According to the group, Rapid Bay and South Australia are parts of the Great Southern Reef, which is a “global biodiversity hotspot”, with 85 per cent of local species found nowhere else in the world.

According to Alan Noble, AusOcean’s founder, “Many locals are not aware that we ve got some of the best dive sites right here in our own backyard just waiting to be explored”.

Alan, who is Google Australia’s ex engineering director, says the old Rapid Bay jetty is one of Australia’s most popular dive sites.

“Built in 1940, the old jetty pylons are beautifully overgrown and are home to an abundance of colourful invertebrates…[including] sponges, soft corals and sea stars,” Alan says. 

The area’s most well-known inhabitants though are the resident population of leafy sea dragons. Related to seahorses, leafy sea dragons have spectacular frond-like appendages allowing themselves to be almost perfectly camouflaged in seaweed.

AusOcean’s aim is to help the ocean through technology, and the organisation believes a continuous underwater camera at Rapid Bay would benefit science as well as raise awareness of the importance of the Great Southern Reef habitat and the flora and fauna that live there. AusOcean hopes the Rapid Bay camera would be the first of many underwater cameras in South Australian waters.

Running through online crowdfunding platform chuffed.org, AusOcean’s campaign had at time of writing raised more than $4,000 of its $10,000 target.

Depending on the size of the donation, those who support the fundraiser are eligible for different perks, ranging from a shoutout on social media or a leafy sea dragon photograph, up to a campfire dinner with the AusOcean crew on a farming property in Willunga, or a day out on the ocean with them diving in Rapid Bay, snorkelling in Second Valley and trying out the organisation’s remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV).

The campaign finishes on 30 December.

Find out more and donate at https://chuffed.org/project/rapid-bay-underwater-live-stream