Sir David Attenborough once said “If you’ve never seen the courtship dance of the Weedy Seadragon then life has still got great treats in store for you.”

...and what a treat it was for us to have marine ecologist Dr Claudia Santori to come and paint and tell us all about the Weedy Seadragon (Phyllopteryx taeniolatus) during the July 2024 art & natural history masterclass.

Claudia travelled from Italy to Australia in pursuit of her PhD at the University of Sydney in freshwater turtle ecology and conservation, which she completed in 2020. Since then, she has worked in marine natural resource management and environmental consulting.

She is now a Project Coordinator at UNSW & Sydney Institute of Marine Science, working on Operation Crayweed. She organises field work to restore crayweed, a species of brown seaweed or kelp, and outreach events to spread the word about the wonders of the underwater world. She is a very passionate diver who loves the local Sydney wildlife, including the Weedy Seadragon – one of the many species relying on kelp for their survival.

They are endemic to the Great Southern Reef, the interconnected seaweed forests fringing the southern half of Australia, where they like to hang out in the kelp so they can hunt for their favourite food: small mysid shrimp which they suck through their elongated mouthparts!

Claudia recently set a Guinness World Record for the longest GPS drawing by kayak, undertaking a beautiful outline of a weedy seadragon in Sydney.