Betty Ratcliffe has spent four years beachcombing Narrabeen’s shoreline at dawn, but she’d never spotted the bright yellow belly of a washed-up weedy seadragon. Then, in a week, she found seven.
“The first one I found had recently died; it was so vibrant, with orange, yellow and purple,” she said. “Over the next couple of days I kept finding more and more.”
Seadragon expert Dr David Booth, a professor of marine ecology at the University of Technology Sydney, said more than 20 seadragons had washed up on Sydney beaches over the past fortnight.
“I’ve only ever seen one washed up,” he said. “It was like, ‘My god, what’s happening?’”
Continue reading on the SMH: ‘My god, what’s happening?’: Dead weedy seadragons wash up on Sydney beaches