 |
 |
|||
© F.Apesteguy/The Seahorse Trust |
Seahorse Biology…. Seahorses really are weird and wonderful miracles of nature. ‘Hippocampus' is the first part of the Latin name, ‘hippo' means horse and ‘campus' means monster or caterpillar! Seahorses are classified as fish but their bodies are incredible, they have skin stretched over interlocking bony plates, like armour, rather than scales. They have monkey-like tails, which they wrap around underwater objects to maintain their position. They have horse-like heads with long thin snouts with which they can suck up tiny shrimp like creatures like a vacuum cleaner. They can move their lizard like eyes so that one eye is looking forwards and the other is looking backwards at the same time. Seahorses are territorial and mate for life. The male and female each maintain a territory of roughly one square metre, which overlap. Every day they meet up at dawn in the males territory and play out an elaborate greeting dance; changing colours, promenading and pirouetting together and often spiralling around an object,. Their display becomes even more elaborate when the seahorses are preparing to mate. From this point on things just get stranger and stranger as it is the male that becomes pregnant! The female transfers her eggs into the male's special pouch like structure (on the tail, below the abdomen) where they are fertilised by his sperm. The eggs then develop and hatch out inside the pouch over a period of 14 to 45 days (depending on the species). As the baby seahorse ‘fry' grow the males pouch becomes enlarges and distended, just like a womb! Then the male has to ‘give birth', expelling the babies through the small pouch opening and experiencing strong muscular contractions, just like labour, in the process. The babies start out at 7 -11mm long and live for 2 to 3 weeks as part of the plankton community before setting up a territory on the sea bed, less than 1 in a 1000 makes it to this stage and they can take up to a year to fully mature. In the entire animal kingdom, only the seahorses, pipefishes, sea dragons and pipehorses have this unique reversal of male and female roles. |
Sources of Info:
The Seahorse Trust website: www.theseahorsetrust.co.uk The Project Seahorse website:
|
||
Seahorses under threat… Seahorse populations around the world are declining rapidly. Perhaps because they are so weird and amazing they have been credited for centuries with magical and medicinal qualities – this is now threatening their very survival. They are threatened by overfishing for use in traditional medicines, as aquarium specimens (where the majority quickly die) and as souvenirs. To compound the problem, seahorses are generally found in shallow coastal water habitat such as in seagrass beds, mangroves, coral reefs and estuaries. These are among the most threatened marine habitats on the planet. They are being polluted, overfished and destroyed by humans as you read this. For more information look up The Seahorse Trust website and The Project Seahorse website. |
||||
Seahorses in Torbay …. Two species of seahorse are clinging on out there in Torbay : • The Spiny Seahorse (Hippocampus guttulatus) • The Short snouted Seahorse (Hippocampus hippocampus) These 2 species are found in other areas around the British Isles too. Only between 8 – 15cm in length, the Spiny Seahorse is a little larger than the Short Snouted Seahorse. They are being monitored by The Seahorse Trust, the Torbay Trust's Seashore Centre at Goodrington and through local divers doing scuba diving surveys. The Spiny Seahorse lives amongst a rare marine plant called Eelgrass, which only grows, in shallow sheltered seas. East facing Torbay is ideal for Eelgrass and there are several beds hiding under the waves and providing a very important habitat for many different marine animals. However, local boat users don't know where it is and so are threatening the seahorses through boat disturbance, anchor damage and pollution. Education and awareness building is vital to sort this problem out. |
||||
|
|
|||
 |
||||
 |
||||
