Sea snakes are mesopredators integral to a range of marine ecosystems in Australia. Australia harbours many regionally endemic sea snakes, including two Critically Endangered-listed species. Conservation efforts are limited by a lack of understanding of their distributions and the difficulty in surveying their remote habitats. eDNA provides an opportunity to efficiently and non-invasively map distributions of cryptic and vulnerable populations of sea snakes. However, two major challenges are the lower cell shedding rate of reptiles compared to other marine animals, which is thought to reduce the total eDNA that can be detected, and how to adequately reconstruct the fragmented distributions of sea snakes across their broad ranges. This talk will report the preliminary results of a project that aims to improve eDNA detection of sea snakes by developing a protocol to sequence water samples, collected initially from enclosed habitats within the Exmouth Gulf, Western Australia. A further aim is to understand how cell-shedding rate and eDNA degradation impacts the limits of detection by eDNA quantification via qPCR in water collected from captive sea snakes in aquaria. This project will provide insights into the specific challenges of using eDNA to detect a novel and ecologically important group of marine organisms.