Longer and less ornamented than the leafy, with yellow spots on a purple-red body. It occurs across the whole temperate south and is the easier of the two to find.
To about 46 cm and longer than the leafy seadragon, with a slender body, a reddish-purple ground colour, rows of bright yellow spots and only a few small leaf-like appendages. The two seadragons are not difficult to separate: if the animal disappears into the weed at two metres it is a leafy, and if it reads as a long red-and-yellow fish it is a weedy.
It is the more widespread of the two and the easier to find, running along the whole temperate southern coast from Western Australia to New South Wales and Tasmania, on rocky reef and in kelp rather than in the dense weed the leafy needs. Males carry the eggs on the underside of the tail for about eight weeks. It moves slowly and is easy to approach, and the usual mistake in photographing one is getting too close too fast with a light on: it turns away, and a seadragon that has turned away stays turned away.
Ratings are per location: 1 means found on most dives that look for it, 5 means a handful of records. Where enough dives have been logged the figure is calculated from them; otherwise it is an editorial estimate, and says so. We publish habitat and destination, not the dive site.