The private company Oceanic Victor uses the island as a departure point to ferry tourists to an at-sea, floating aquarium in adjacent waters.

Ethel was supposedly "searching among the rocks for a pocket knife when her foot slipped and she fell down a precipitous part of the Western Point and thence into the sea".

[8] In July 1991, the National Parks & Wildlife Service estimated the Encounter Bay area (which includes Granite, West and Wright Islands) population of little penguins to total 7,000 birds.

Nocturnal tours of the penguin colony commenced that year as a joint initiative of the National Parks and Wildlife Service and the Victor Harbor Council.

[12] On 6 November 1992, a man counted nine dead penguins above the high tide mark while walking between Victor Harbor and Port Elliot, but was unable to lodge an official report of the discovery.

[13] Anne Boulter, a local resident who made regular private counts along a limited section of the island, believed the colony to also be stable in 1994.

[19] Students of the Victor Harbor High School were among those who expressed concern about the extent and the impact of the proposed tourism development on the penguin colony.

[27] Flinders University intends to establish a centre at which animals can be captively studied, bred, and potentially released back to the wild.

Dianne and Stephen Edwards took on the Granite Island lease in 1999, with the view to establishing a floating at-sea aquarium as a tourist attraction and expanding the Penguin Interpretive Centre.

[29] In early 2015, a proposal to locate a marine tourism venture offshore from Granite Island was made by Oceanic Victor to the Government of South Australia.

The venture was expected to open for business in February 2016 but was delayed due to an appeal of the Development Assessment Commission's approval decision.

[31] The attraction involves a floating sea cage aquaculture pen, containing up to five tonnes of southern bluefin tuna, which paying customers can swim with and hand feed.