
Leafy sea dragons are not Californian natives: I saw them in the Birch Aquarium at the Scripps Institute for Oceanography but they are only found in the wild off southern Australia. My first sight of a live, swimming sea dragon was a surprise because they are usually yellow bodied with green appendages but the aquarium animal was almost transparent: they can colour match to their surroundings and the tanks they were kept in were relatively colourless. The oddities of sea dragons don’t stop with their camouflage. Most notably, the male broods the young on brood patches on the tail. They are, of course, threatened and the Scripps Institute has a program to breed them in captivity.