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Leafy Seadragon

Phycodurus eques · impossible

The leafy seadragon is a fish that has invested almost everything in not looking like one. Its body carries long lobed appendages that mimic drifting kelp fronds in shape, colour and translucency, and the fish enhances the effect behaviourally by drifting rather than swimming, rocking with the surge as a loose piece of weed would. The propulsion comes from nearly transparent fins that beat too fast to see, so an observer watching a leafy seadragon move sees seaweed travelling under its own power.

It is a relative of seahorses and pipefish and shares their reproductive arrangement. The female transfers eggs onto a spongy patch under the male's tail, where they are embedded, fertilised, oxygenated and carried until they hatch. The young get no further care.

Leafy seadragons have no teeth and no stomach. They feed by drawing tiny crustaceans through a long tubular snout, essentially continuously, because nothing is stored.

They are found only along the temperate southern coast of Australia, among kelp beds and seagrass. Being poor swimmers tied to a specific habitat, they are vulnerable to storms that wash them out and to any degradation of the weed beds they depend on for both food and disguise.

Where it lives

Worml lists the leafy seadragon as native to Australia. Its habitat is temperate kelp beds and seagrass.

Ranges here are reduced to whole countries for playability and exclude introduced populations — see about the data for what that simplification leaves out.

In the game

Leafy Seadragon is rated impossible. To solve the round you need to name the single country it lives in. How scoring works →

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