‘They’re so curious and playful, they’re like big puppies’
The Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition includes this intriguing Australian image. It’s not just a sea lion we are looking at.
For sheer charisma, few animals can match the Australian sea lion, Scott Portelli reckons. He should know: he spends 10 months of every year leading expeditions to far-flung spots – Antarctica, the Falkland Islands, Rwanda, PNG – to photograph the wildlife. He’s been up close with leopard seals and king penguins, mountain gorillas and humpback whales; he’s about to lead a party to Baffin Island in the Arctic, looking for polar bears and narwhals. But there’s a special place in his heart for the Australian sea lion, an endangered species found around our southwest coast.
“They’re so curious and playful,” he says. “When you’re diving they’ll come up and touch you with their flippers, and rub their whiskers against your mask, just to check you out. They’re like big puppies.”
He shot this image during a dive off Esperance; it’s from the international Wildlife Photographer of the Year awards, now exhibiting at the Australian National Maritime Museum.
Now, have you spotted the other interesting animal yet? It looks like a piece of floating kelp; in fact it’s a leafy sea dragon. Portelli has a soft spot for “leafies”, too, it turns out: these 20cm long creatures, related to seahorses, are adorned with leaf-like appendages that serve as camouflage as they waft around with the swaying kelp fronds, snapping up tiny crustaceans called mysids.
“They’re freaks of nature,” Portelli says fondly. He was photographing the leafy when the sea lion came over to investigate; watching two of his favourite creatures interact was a rare gift, he says.
“The sea lion was looking at me, then looking at the leafy, then back at me again,” he recalls, laughing. “You could see it was thinking, ‘Why are you showing an interest in this thing?’”
Incidentally, if the leafy sea dragon’s camouflage worked its magic on you, you’re not alone. At the gala opening of the awards in London’s Natural History Museum, the finalist images were displayed in turn on a big screen while an MC gave a little spiel. When Portelli’s image came up, the 300 attendees thought they were just looking at a portrait of a sea lion. Says Portelli: “Then the MC pointed out the leafy in the foreground and everyone in the audience went, “Ahhh!”