Dear Mr. Bailey,

Thanks for fielding my question and forwarding the pictures of the frog fish. I had my younger son take a look at the pictures you sent us. We agree that there are some passing similarities, but what we saw wasn’t a frog fish. I’ll forward an attached picture of the critter that was a dead ringer for what my son and I observed up close, over the course of several minutes, behaving in exactly the way the leafy sea dragon is said to move. The only thing that was different, besides the geographical location, was that we spotted our specimen near the surface, rather than the several meters down that they are usually reported to inhabit in the Australian waters. This made observing it simple enough for floating snorkelers, since we could simply drift there close enough to reach out and touch it.

I realize that misidentification of a fish by an untrained amateur seems a more likely explanation than a species appearing that far out of its usual range. Particularly when the report comes a dozen years after the observation occurred, and the species is not a migratory one. I am certain that misidentification is not what happened in this instance, however. I’ve done a great deal of diving and snorkeling, not only during our five years in the reefs in Hawaii, but elsewhere before and since. I have a keen and ongoing interest in the natural world, particularly the underwater world. I have also honed my powers in observation of new species as a hobby entomologist on land. What we saw was indeed the leafy sea dragon, not even its close cousin, the weedy sea dragon, much less a frog fish. I cannot swear whether the one we saw was a male or female of the species, which have a slight visible difference viewed side by side. That much the twelve years has taken from me. I believe it was a male, however.

I’ve been puzzling over this anomaly since I realized that’s what it was, trying to figure out how such a thing could have occurred. For me, the mystery deepens when I read that as an aquarium fish the leafy sea dragon run between three to six thousand dollars each. That makes it highly unlikely a local collector would take one down and dump it in the ocean when he got tired of cleaning his salt water tank, or was moving from the islands and decided to set his pets free rather than take them with him. If I had known they were that pricey, I might have been tempted to capture the one we saw for sale. (I did do some dabbling in collecting more common species of reef dwellers later for sale to local aquariums.) The specimen we saw was unusual enough that I would have taken a picture of it purely for novelty sake, if we had a camera with us that day. This creature is visually stunning, particularly if you’ve poked around in kelp beds on the California coast as much as I have. If you see a leafy sea dragon, you are unlikely to forget it, or to mistake it for something else. It brands itself in your brain.