I have nothing to gain by insisting on the accuracy of our sighting, of course, nor any way to prove that’s what we actually observed at this juncture. But I am certain enough that I’ve been asking around on the Internet trying to find out if anyone else has seen them in Hawaiian waters. I discovered there is an entire organization in Australia who track sightings of this species and report them on line as a means of study and conservation. They’ve even got an annual festival in honor of these things down there. Plainly, they find the species as intriguing as we did. The only problem is that in the pop down options where a person can report where they’ve sighted a leafy sea dragon on line, Hawaii simply doesn’t appear. It is a very long way from the known range of a species that is a notable homebody even in its local waters, rarely traveling more than a few hundred yards from where it is first sighted.

Which only deepens the mystery for me, of course. The only thing I can think of would be someone working at the research pier who was dabbling at a personal project of introducing the species in Hawaiian waters. I suppose that would be possible. Unlikely, but possible. Once when I was a boy, we brought a jar of fireflies from their native Missouri where we’d caught them and released them in Bend, Oregon. Someone spotted one, and the report ended up in the local newspaper. That was not a freak of nature, but an act of man. Perhaps this was the same.

Thank you for the effort you have taken in providing a reasoned response. I currently live just north of you in Stoneham, MA. We have visited the aquarium in Boston. My older son’s girlfriend worked there as a volunteer for a time.

Sincerely,

Skip Johnson