Photo 109612344, (c) Gary Williams, some rights reserved (CC BY-SA), uploaded by Gary Williams

Attribution © Gary Williams
some rights reserved
Uploaded by clintsteel clintsteel
Source iNaturalist Australia
Associated observations

Photos / Sounds

What

Olive-headed Sea Snake (Hydrophis major)

Observer

clintsteel

Date

January 8, 2021 09:27 AM AEDT

Description

This snake looked dead until I touched it and it moved. The close-up shows an "alive eye".
NSW National Parks has a brochure noting that 11 sea snakes have been observed in NSW but only rarely and as vagrants, the exception being the Yellow-bellied Sea Snake (Pelamis platurus). That one has a different head shape to this record and the head scale pattern does not quite match. So I checked all 10 species on iNatAU and there are few or no records for NSW - Stokes Sea Snake has a record (Coffs Harbour), 4 records for the Bar bellied Sea Snake and 2 for the Olive headed sea snake.
The photos look closest to the Olive Sea Snake (Aipysurus laevis) but the head scale pattern is not quite the same.

Sizes