Some years ago, on September 22, the “Philippine Daily Inquirer” carried a news report about rare species of seahorses in the Philippines that had not been seen before in the country’s seas.
Divers reportedly captured on camera two rare species of seahorse. The news item said: “The photographs of a weedy pygmy seahorse (“Hippocampus pontohi”) and Severn’s pygmy seahorse (“Hippocampus severnsi”) were submitted to the iSeahorse website (www.iseahorse.org), which gathers sightings from the public, and have been verified by the Zoological Society of London’s Project Seahorse as the first records of these species in the Philippines.”
The two rare species brought “a total of 11 species of seahorse known to inhabit Philippine waters.” The report added: “Conservationists hope that news of this discovery will encourage other members of the public to keep their eyes for these chameleon-like fish when they are out snorkeling or diving in coastal waters.”
“The exciting discovery of these seahorses in new waters demonstrates the important role citizen scientists can play in conservation,” said Chai Apale, iSeahorse Philippines coordinator for Project Seahorse. “Seahorses are found all over the country, but we need the support and participation of the citizen scientists to help us map out the exact locations of these threatened fishes.”
Although they are not yet considered endangered, seahorses are on the verge of oblivion. The coastal community of Handumon in Getafe, Bohol, for instance, was once upon a time a haven for seahorses. In fact, there used to be seahorse-watching activities in the area.
But when fishermen learned there was a ready market for the strange-looking fish, they harvested them as if there was no tomorrow.
“I’ve been fishing seahorses for 18 years,” a local fisherman told People and the Planet. “They are very important for my family because I use (the money I get for my catch) to buy food and medicine.”
Today, the once seahorse-rich waters of Handumon are devoid of the marine creatures that used to abound. According to PSF’s Angie Nellas, they could still easily spot a seahorse within a few-meter radius of the marine protected area. This was between the late ‘90s and in the early 2000. These days, it takes about an hour or so to find just even one seahorse.
“In the past, you can get seahorses all over Bohol. It changed when opportunistic men discovered there is a ready market for it,” Nellas told Freeman’s Liv G. Campo. Buyers pay from P50 to P70 per seahorse or a whooping P14,000 per kilo.
“The threats are great to seahorses around the world,” said Dr. Amanda Vincent, a Canadian marine biologist who established Project Seahorse Foundation (PSF), a community-based resource management program in the area in 1995. She believed that global trade in seahorses, involving around 38 countries, is largely to blame.
Seahorses have been used in Chinese medicine for at least 400 years. They are used to treat asthma, arteriosclerosis, incontinence, impotence, kidney disorders, skin ailments, and thyroid disorders.
But seahorses are known to be aphrodisiacs and believed to keep a person stay young. “Eating seahorses keeps the 80-year-old granddaddy young,” so goes a saying. Emperor Tangminghuan, one of the most popular Chinese emperors who ruled from 712 to 756, reportedly drank seahorse-infused liquor in his later years.
But it is their purported aphrodisiacs properties that seahorses are noted for. Traditional Chinese medicine said that the larger the seahorse, the more super their potency will be. “Seahorse is considered to be a powerful sex tonic,” someone said. “It provides strong Yang energy to the kidney giving its reputation as an aphrodisiac. It is used in a wide variety of men’s tonic formulations to build sexual strength.”
The website of Save Our Seahorses reported: “The traditional Chinese medicine industry takes approximately 150 million seahorses per year from the wild for use mainly as natural aphrodisiacs.”
But there’s a new trend. “However, our research has discovered a worrying new trend for dosing Chinese children with seahorse pills in the belief it will spur growth. Seahorses have also been proven to have high levels of collagen, which is encouraging Chinese women to use it as a substitute for Botox,” the website said.
The way seahorses are processed for trade is inhumane, so to speak. “I hate the way the fishermen just hang the seahorses out to dry, stringing them up and leaving them to flop in the sun,” said Dr. Vincent.
The Seahorse Trust shared this information: “(The seahorse) is caught from the sea and hung in the sun until it dies, where it desiccates as it wriggles in its death. Once it is dead and dried, it is sold by the fisher to a middleman. The fisher makes just a few cents whereas the middleman puts a big mark up on the cost of the seahorse and makes a large profit. The seahorses are then sold to markets or factories for preparation into medicine.”
From Australia to the Philippines, a species of two is found in most coastal areas with sea grass beds, mangroves or coral reefs. Worldwide, there are perhaps 35 species. The smallest species have fewer than 100 offspring. Just 1/4-inch long when born, seahorse species grow to two inches to 12 inches.
The seahorse, whose genus Hippocampus (hippo means “horse” and campus “worm”) is placed in the family Syngnathidae. It swims weakly, propelled largely by the rapid motion of its dorsal fin. Its food primarily of minute planktonic crustaceans, which are ingested into a small mouth at the end of a long tube-like snout by rapid intake of water.
The seahorse characteristic that many find fascinating is the reversed sex roles. The male has a kangaroo-like pouch on its ventral side in which the eggs are deposited by the female and held until they hatch. The eggs are fertilized as they enter the pouch, hatching after approximately 10 days.
“Like chameleons, seahorses can change color to match their surroundings, going from drab to psychedelic in a matter of moments, and they can even grow skin filaments to better mimic algae or coral,” Natalie Angier wrote in New York Times.
Seahorses have been swimming the seas for an estimated 40 million years. They are pictured on Greek vases, for they were thought to be the offspring of the stallions that carried the god Poseidon’s chariot across the waves.
It wasn’t in the 18th century that scientists realized seahorses are actually fish, though highly modified ones. Unlike most fish, they wear their bones on the outside, as an exoskeletal armor that offers considerable protection against predation.
As fish, seahorses are very romantic. Once they have chosen a partner, they have eyes for no other. “In a world where infidelity is almost universal, seahorses pair up and seem to be unerringly faithful to their mates, reaffirming their bond each day through elaborate courtship rituals,” Angier wrote.
In love, seahorses are thoroughbreds. “Once they have chosen a partner, they have eyes for no other,” wrote Angier. “A married seahorse of either sex cannot be persuaded to cheat on its mate even when presented with a tankful of willing singles. The pair reaffirm their bond each morning through a courtship ritual of quivering, tail-wrapping, and dancing round and round a blade of seagrass like figures on a music box.”
It’s the female seahorse who roam farther afield than the male, ever on the lookout for better feeding grounds. “She needs the calories to generate a clutch of eggs,” Angier wrote. “And when her eggs are ripe, the tango begins. She approaches her mate and raises her head upward in a slow arc. He quivers in response. She nods more emphatically, and he nods in refrain. Facing each other swan-style, they entwine their tails and rise upward in the water. They disengage and do it again, five, 10, 50 times for houses and hours.”
“They’re trying to line their bodies up perfectly,” said Dr. Heather Masonjones of Amherst College in Massachusetts, “so the female can insert her ovipositer into the male’s brood pouch.”
Unlike human beings, it’s the male seahorse who get pregnant. “Eventually, their bodies harmonize, and she transfers her eggs into his womb. As she does so, the male releases a burst of sperm from a cloacal opening above the pouch, fertilizing the eggs internally.
“In many species of fish males tend to the eggs and even brood live embryos in their mouths, but nowhere else in the animal kingdom is fertilization known to occur within the male’s body,” Angier wrote.
Scientific studies have shown seahorses having no problem of breeding, but only one in a thousand will reach maturity. Of those, tens of millions are captured and processed annually for medicines or as aphrodisiac.
“Every year, a staggering 150 million-plus seahorses are used in the traditional medicine trade, this is just not sustainable,” deplored The Seahorse Trust. “Seahorses could be extinct in the wild within the next 20 to 30 years, unless we address the problems facing them, we can sort this problem out but time is running out.”
Countries that trade in seahorses include Australia, Belize, Brazil, China, Dubai, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore, Spain, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Taiwan, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, United States, and Vietnam.
But trade is not the only threat to seahorses, as their ocean habitat – primarily mangrove, sea grass, and coral ecosystems – are some of the most endangered in the world.
“Worldwide, over the past few decades an estimated half of all mangrove habitats have been destroyed; nearly 60 percent of coral reef habitat has disappeared, become degraded and/or fallen under imminent threat; and some 1,400 square miles of sea grass habitat has been lost,” reported the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI).
“Such degradation – caused by coastal development, pollution, dredging, climate change, and destructive fishing practices that include the use of trawls, dynamite and poisons – are just some of the threats to the places seahorses call home,” AWI added.
According to the Save Our Seahorses, the current fishing practices are detrimental to the survival of seahorses. “We are campaigning for changes in fishing laws to better protect the wild populations of seahorses,” it said. “A simple change such as returning pregnant males to the wild would make a huge difference to the population of seahorse found in the wild.”
The organization believes that “seahorse cultivation is a key element to the survival of the species.” It wrote: “If demand can be met with cultivated specimens, it would relieve huge pressure that is felt by the wild population which is currently being overfished.”
A couple of years ago, the Iloilo-based Southeast Asian Fisheries Development Center (SEAFDEC) was considering to breed seahorses in closely supervised sea ranches. Its scientists have already “studied the development of captive breeder’s for fry and juvenile production.”
Based on initial results, seahorses can be successfully bred in captivity.
This should be done before it’s too late. “We need to put the brakes on now, before there’s a catastrophic collapse,” Dr. Vincent reminded. “You can’t afford to lose 50% of a population in five years.” – (Next: Dugong)
