The paper is open access and has a 2 minute video summarizing our observations, as well as some frame grabs and a supplement of some images of a ruby seadragon that washed ashore in 2015 and was photographed by Zoe Della Vedova.
There has been some good media coverage and some of our favorite stories are:
Our paper reporting the discovery of the live ruby seadragons will appear in Marine Biodiversity Records (https://mbr.biomedcentral.com/) in January 2017. The paper will be open access and have a video as a supplemental file. We will post a link to this and the various press releases as they appear.
We visited the Western Australian Museum and the common and leafy seadragon tissue samples we collected will be accessioned there. They will then be loaned to us at Scripps Institution of Oceanography for DNA sequencing as part of Josefin’s PhD project. We will also be writing up our observations on the ruby seadragon as soon as possible. We will announce the publication and any associated press releases here. Thanks for following.
April 13; we left Bremer Bay and drove through Albany to stay near the small town of Walpole. Our intention had been to dive at Walpole, as leafy seadragons had been sighted here and we had no samples from so far west. However, the inlet was blocked by sand and so the boat we had planned to use could not go out to the site. Our backup was to try and sample at Albany, though this meant a bit of back and forth commuting.
We had sampled common seadragons in Albany 10 years ago and it had been slow going, with quite a few dives needed. The same was apparent here again and we saw alot of lovely habitat, but no seadragons.
Lots of seagrass but we didnt see any Albany seadragons this visit.
After a few dives we decided that looking around local beaches for washed up seadragons may be more productive, though this didn’t work out. We then transited back to Perth on April 17.
April 12 was still wet and stormy and getting into our damp gear made us jealous of Craig and his dry suit…oh well. We headed back to the same site as yesterday and did a long and fruitless dive. We decided that we were happy with nine leafies and six weedies for Bremer Bay, especially as we had sampled here 10 years ago. So we didn’t do a second dive and instead did some more beach-combing for washed up seadragons. We weren’t lucky and we then spent the afternoon sorting out gear and catching up emails (and this blog!). Tonight we will share a meal with Craig Lebens to whom we are very very grateful for his wonderful knowledge and help. Tomorrow we keep heading west to do some more dives in Albany, our last sampling site on this expedition. More from there…….
April 11 was rainy and windy and we really only had one option for diving. Luckily this was a place where common seadragons are known, so Craig Lebens took us there to do a series of shore dives.
On the beach getting ready as the storm clouds roll in….
On the first dive we picked up two common dragons, so things were looking good. They can be little devils to see, as you can get a sense of here in a photo without flash….
Common seadragon at 8 meters depth.
Once they are lit up with a light or strobe their lovely colors are apparent.
Josefin shepherding a common seadragon for a full lateral body photograph.
Here is the same seadragon in a short video.
On the second dive we werent so lucky and saw no seadragons at all. It’s on those dives that you start to imagine they don’t exist…..
On a break between dives we went to walk on an exposed beach and found a leafy seadragon that had been recently washed up. We took a small clip of tissue for sequencing.
Leafy seadragon washed up at Bremer Bay.
On the third and final dive of the day we went out a bit further and quickly picked up a leafy seadragon to take our total for Bremer Bay to nine (including the beachwashed sample) and then went for a long period before a sudden flurry of common seadragons appeared and we picked up four new specimens, bringing our total to six for the day. We were very happy after that and planned to have one or two more dives the next day to finish up our visit to Bremer Bay.
April 10 started with little wind and we met with Craig Lebens at 7 with a plan to get two dives in before the north easterly wind kicked in and made diving impossible. We headed out to an area we had sampled with Craig before and it yielded once again some spectacular seadragons. Craig has a great eye and dives often and knows where individual seadragons hangout.
Craig and Josefin getting ready.
On the first dive we picked up four leafies, juveniles and adults, and were very happy with that. There as quite alot of surge as can be seen in the video below. Also you can see how amazing Craig is to have picked out the seadragon against the wall.
A juvenile leafy seadragon with yellow coloration similar to these we saw at Lucky Bay.
A magnificent adult leafy seadragon. Note the lack of a ‘topknot’ something we see quite often with the leafies at Bremer Bay.
It got better with the second dive when we picked up another three.
Josefin behind another leafy adult, also lacking a ‘topknot’.
Another juvenile leafy in a cloud of mysid crustaceans, their main food source. This individual had a lovely pinkish/red color.
Being busy seeking seadragons, we didn’t have time to really appreciate how spectacular Bremer Bay is as a dive site. We had two truly wonderful dives today and we thoroughly recommend a visit to this place, not just for seadragons. For instance there is an amazing amount of hard coral here. The water temperature was 18C today and does not drop below 17C.
A large bommie of Turbinaria coral.
It looks like the weather will restrict us to shore dives for the next few days, but this is OK as we now wish to try and find our other main target, the common seadragon.
Following the success of the Hunt for the Ruby Seadragon, which we still find somewhat amazing, the team went their separate ways with Nerida, Rusty and Daff heading back to Perth. Nerida will join us again in a few days. Josefin and Greg drove off to Bremer Bay to sample more leafy and common seadragons. We stopped on the way though at the lovely town of Hopetoun where we met with Kirsty Duffy who had some interesting observations about seadragons to share. We could not stay long or explore the Fitzgerald River National Park but we did stop to look at a lovely array ofBanksia.
We arrived at Bremer Bay in the late afternoon and caught up with Craig Lebens at Bremer Bay Diving.
Craig was a wonderful help for us 10 years ago when we first started this project and we plan to spend three days here diving with him to sample the local populations of seadragons once again. The weather situation is not great but we decided we would head out early tomorrow morning to beat the wind and try and see some leafies.
Today, April 8, we transited back to Esperance and sorted out shipping our gear back to Perth. Tomorrow, Josefin and Greg will drive onto Hopetoun and Bremer Bay in the west to continue looking for leafy and common seadragons to provide tissue samples for her PhD project. Nerida, Rusty and Daff will head back to Perth. We are so very grateful to the team at Esperance Diving and Fishing for their logistical support. Col and Kingsley kept us safe at sea, fed us well and got us to the right spot to find ruby seadragons. Daff piloted the ROV brilliantly and provided us with great images. We thank him and Total Marine Technology for their support of this expedition. We also thank Dewy White, without whom the first sightings of live ruby seadragons would not have been possible.
April 7, our last day of diving and we got lucky; the swell had dropped to about a meter. We left Middle Island a little after dawn, and headed back out to our study site. Col had figured out way for us to hold the Southern Conquest in position while the ROV operated and so we were able to explore the line we wanted with relative ease. Nevertheless, it was surprising how the surface swell was clearly reaching the bottom at more than 50 meters and could move the little ROV around.
The Seabotix ROV about to dive down to 50+ meters.
On the second dive of the day there was huge excitement in the cabin where the ROV footage was being viewed live as a stunning female ruby seadragon came into view. We followed the fish for about 10 minutes and it obligingly provided good profile views for the camera.
We are not showing an image of the two fish we saw as we will write this up for a journal and release the videos with a press release in a few months. The image below is representative of the place we saw the seadragons, at 54 meters, so you can get a sense of the habitat. We have overlaid the habitat with one of plastic common seadragon mascots (painted to be like a ruby seadragon).
The habitat of the ruby seadragon at 54 meters. Our plastic ruby seadragon mascot is overlayed on top of one of the actual seadragons we saw.
After the excitement of two seadragons on one dive, we looked for more unsuccessfully for another two dives before the light faded and it was time to seek shelter. We were all stunned with the success and it made for a very happy boat as we had a celebratory dinner as the sunset at Middle Island.
