Birch Aquarium at Scripps Seahorse and Seadragon Exhibit

In San Diego, you’ll learn that dragons are real—they’re just lurking under the sea. The Birch Aquarium at Scripps is home to an extensive exhibit of seahorses and, yes, seadragons, which has been designed both to educate visitors on these otherworldly species and preserve them for generations to come. Here you can come face to face with these tiny creatures, and watch them dart through a specialized habitat designed to create an ideal environment for breeding.

Most visitors will already be familiar with seahorses, one of the ocean’s most iconic creatures thanks to their equine heads and upright posture. At the exhibit, you can learn more about their fascinating biology, like their prehensile tails, which help them latch on to plants and coral. 

Seadragons are a lesser known, but even more visually striking fish, and the Birch Aquarium at Scripps' exhibit focuses on weedy and leafy seadragons. These fascinating animals resemble dragons with their long, tubular snouts, which they use to slurp up tiny crustaceans. (Don’t worry: no fire breathing here.) They have delicate appendages that often resemble seaweed or leaves—hence the names—which are used for camouflage. The Birch’s exhibit allows visitors to watch these creatures drift through the water as their ethereal leafy bits wave in their wake.

With its dramatic lighting and high-color photographs, the exhibit encourages visitors to observe these creatures the way that scientists do, observing the minutiae of their tiny bodies and the mating behaviors that are crucial to the aquarium’s breeding programs. The exhibit also highlights the importance of preservation efforts for seahorses and seadragons, which are under threat thanks to climate change, unsustainable fishing practices, and the illegal collection of wild populations. Both species are considered “bioindicators” of an environment’s health, meaning that they are particularly sensitive to changes in their environment, and can absorb pollutants in their bodies. This makes them a particularly valuable species for the marine biologists here to study, and makes their conservation all the more important.