---
title: "Australia’s Lake Hillier stays bubble gum pink even in a jar, thanks to salt-loving microbes"
url: https://badiyaa.com/lake-hillier-pink-lake-australia-microbes/
published: 2026-11-13T21:32:00+00:00
modified: 2026-11-13T21:32:00+00:00
section: Offbeat
publisher: Badiyaa
---

# Australia’s Lake Hillier stays bubble gum pink even in a jar, thanks to salt-loving microbes

Lake Hillier, a salt lake on Western Australia's Middle Island, stays pink even in a jar because salt-loving algae, bacteria and archaea color it.

Scoop a jar of water out of Lake Hillier and it stays pink. The color of this salt lake on Middle Island, off the south coast of Western Australia, does not fade when the water is taken away from the shore, because it comes from living microbes packed into the brine rather than from a trick of light.

From the air, the lake looks like a solid slab of bubble gum pink, set between a dark green band of paperbark and eucalyptus forest and the deep blue Southern Ocean. Only a thin strip of vegetated dunes separates it from the sea. From the shoreline, the water looks clearer, more of a see-through rose.

## Why the water is pink

For years, the color was credited to a single organism, the salt-loving green alga Dunaliella salina. That alga survives brine strong enough to kill most life by loading its cells with beta-carotene, the same orange-red pigment found in carrots, which shields it from intense sunlight. It also packs in glycerol to keep its cells from drying out in the salt.

DNA sequencing has made the picture more crowded. In 2015, scientists with the Extreme Microbiome Project ran a metagenomic survey of the lake and found salt-loving bacteria such as Salinibacter ruber alongside several kinds of archaea, single-celled organisms that thrive in extreme places. Nearly all of them carry some pink, red or salmon pigment, so the lake’s color is better understood as a team effort than the work of one alga.

Those microbes are the only living things in the water. The salt level is comparable to the Dead Sea, yet the lake has no known harmful effects on people and is considered safe to swim in.

## Timeline: from ship’s log to salt works

- **January 15, 1802:** explorer Matthew Flinders climbs the island’s highest point, now Flinders Peak, and records “a small lake of a rose colour”, the first written description. A crew member reports salt crystallized thickly enough along the shore “to load a ship”.

- **May 1803:** Flinders returns to collect casks of salt from the lake. The lake is later named for William Hillier, a crew member of HMS Investigator who died on May 20, 1803, before the ship left the island.

- **1889:** Edward Andrews moves onto the island with his two sons to test commercial salt production. They leave after about a year.

- **Late 1800s:** salt mining on the lake fails, with reports pointing in part to the salt being unfit to eat.

- **2002 onward:** the lake is rated a wetland of subregional significance and now lies inside the Recherche Archipelago Nature Reserve.

## How big it is, and how to see it

The lake is about 600 meters long and 250 meters wide, covering roughly 15 hectares, or 37 acres. That is about the area of 28 American football fields, end zones included. Flinders first set eyes on it 224 years ago, and its basic shape has not changed since.

Seeing it in person is hard. Scenic tours generally do not land on Middle Island, and no regular service runs to the lake. Most visitors view it from sightseeing flights out of Esperance Airport, which pass over nearby Cape Le Grand National Park, or from cruises around the archipelago.

The pink has been weaker in some recent years after heavy rain diluted the brine, though scientists expect the color to come back as the water level drops. Lake Hillier is not the only natural color show Badiyaa has explained: [noctilucent clouds glow about 50 miles above the ground](https://badiyaa.com/noctilucent-clouds-highest-earth-explained/), and more places like this live in our [Offbeat section](https://badiyaa.com/category/offbeat/).

## Further reading

- [Wikipedia: Lake Hillier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Hillier)

- [Wikipedia: Dunaliella salina](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunaliella_salina)

*Image: Yodaobione, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons*

*This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*