The Sea Dragons

The top photo shows a beautiful leafy sea dragon (葉形海龍). It is a close relative to a sea horse. These sea dragons can be found in the ocean waters at the coastlines of southern Western Australia, South Australia and further east to Victoria province and even at Tasmania.

These sea dragons have the power of camouflage. They change colours similar to their surroundings (see photo in the middle). In spite of their larger bodies, their leaf-like appendages and swaying movements similar to those of drifting seaweeds protect them from threats of bigger fishes. In addition, they have spines which act as armour to their bodies. They usually hide among floating seaweeds or kelp beds. One interesting thing is that their eyes can move independently.

They feed on larval fishes and amphipods such as mysids (sea lice) - very tiny shrimps. They use their long sucking tubes at the mouths to take in their food.

It is interesting to know that after mating, a female sea dragon may lay as many as 250 eggs onto the brood patch on the underside of the male’s tail. Then the male sea dragon carries and incubates the eggs until they hatch.

There is another kind of sea dragons called weedy sea dragons (草形海龍)(see the bottom photo). Unlike leafy sea dragons which wear elegant night gowns, the weedy sea dragons appear in simpler shapes with very beautiful textures on their bodies!

The top and bottom photos were extracted from divegallery.com while the middle one from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, by the author, Wendy Rathey.