There are two distinctly coloured populations of Eastern water dragons living in this corner of Fisherman’s Bay. There are the clean dragons living in the back yard and then there are the dirty dragons that live down by the creek. Clean dragons are grey, flecked with black and white, and dominant males have a distinct red blush on the chest. The rusty dragons live in creek water which carries iron tinged algae. The colour is permanent, but because lizards shed shed their skin a dirty lizard will eventually become clean if it moves away from the creek. The change of colour will take a couple of years to be complete. Some lizards will carry a two-tone appearance for some time.
All dragons like to slumber on a warm patch of their territory. This group of three females and a larger male are taking advantage of a clearing in the ferns where the sun heats the dark soil by the creek. These lizards have been swimming and are now mostly dry, but there is wet patch where one female lizard has been lying on top of the male in the middle. The male can be identified by his large head. Males wrestle to gain dominance, so there is an advantage to having a large head, or rather, a larger set of jaws.
Which brings us to the latin name of the water dragon; Physignathus lesueurii, where the generic epithet (the first capitalised part of the binomial) refers to a large jaw. The specific epithet refers here to the French artist and naturalist Charles Alexandre Lesueur who traveled with Baudin to Australia in 1801. The Baudin expedition collected over 100000 specimens and many animals were described from this collection.
