Wild Ocean Blue

A few weeks ago at the University Library, here in Cambridge, I made a rather wonderful discovery. I uncovered a forgotten hero of underwater filmmaking (and I found some seahorses).

Cambridge University Library. Photo by Nick in exsilio

I was doing some research for my next book proposal (and no, I’m not going to say what it’s about yet), and I did my usual trick of browsing a few books up and down from the one I came for. Unlike many other research libraries, the UL lets you walk among many of the shelves which means you often stumble on hidden treasures you weren’t expecting.

It’s interesting to see what books the library staff have chosen to catalogue together, using their baffling numbering system that seems determined to keep me wandering the shelves, cursing under my breath when the clockwork egg timer on the light runs out, plunging me into mid-isle darkness.

This time, on a shelf of natural history books I had passed by before, I noticed a title that set my eyes popping:

“Quest of the curly-tailed horses.”

How did I manage to miss this one when I was researching Poseidon’s Steed?

Big belly seahorse. Photo by Doug Deep

I was kicking myself. Surely, I’d been exhaustive in my search for seahorsey literature, and yet here was a neat volume, with a cute seahorse on the frontispiece. Of course the curly-tailed horses came right home with me that day. And over the following week I devoured the book in blissful evening installments while wallowing in the bath (one of my guilty pleasures).

And to my surprise, it wasn’t just the seahorses in this book that I adored, but my discovery of the man who wrote it. This book, it turned out, was the autobiography from the 1960s of an important, but virtually forgotten character in the world of underwater filmmaking and exploration: Noel Monkman. And what a life he led.

Monkman was born in New Zealand at the turn of the 20th century. The book begins in his troubled childhood spent in sullen boarding houses, being shifted from place to place by his father who attempted to keep him away from his mother after she made the unpardonable decision to continue with a music career instead of devoting herself to family life. Times were very different back then.

In delightful early chapters, Monkman describes his time spent on the New Zealand coast where he made friends with a local maori boy and together they discovered the extraordinary wildlife of the beach. They built a rock corral on the shore and filled it with their favourite creatures, including the curly-tailed horses.

Big belly seahorse. Photo by Richard Ling

They must have been Big-Belly Seahorses, Hippocampus abdominalis, since it’s the only species native to New Zealand. And at up to around 30cm or a foot from head to tail, these are the biggest seahorses in the world.

An amusing section in Chapter 6 describes his frustrations in trying to persuade the seahorses to eat. He offered them fish, bits of mussel, and all his own favourite foods: cake, biscuits, strawberry jam, plum pudding, apples, pears and plums. He even thought – being horses – he should try them on oats or bran. But no. The seahorses were having none of it.

Eventually, though, he cracks the puzzle of what seahorses eat, writing:

“As I lay beside the pool watching them, I noticed that occasionally one or other of them would turn slowly sideways as if watching something; then there would be a sudden flick of the head as if it had given a dainty little sneeze.”

Sneezing seahorses. What a lovely image!

Big belly seahorse. Photo by tassiesim

And how thrilled he was when he discovered the seahorses were feeding on minute animals.

“The worry about food for the curly-tailed horses had ushered us into a world of wonders.”

I’m not going to give too much more away because a big part of why I loved this read was knowing nothing at all about Noel Monkman before I started and uncovering so many gems along the way.

What I will say is that his childhood love of the seashore, and seahorses, stayed with him and through a series of jobs and adventures, work as a portrait photographer, building laborer and concert cellist, until Noel Monkman eventually found himself exploring the Great Barrier Reef in the 1930s accompanied by his wife, Kitty, making the first ever underwater films of the world’s biggest reef.

Their story echoes the famous explorations of another husband and wife team, Hans and Lottie Hass, and yet few people have heard of the Monkmans.

When I finished his book and began looking around online for more information about what happened to Noel Monkman, I was shocked to find so little.

So, I definitely recommend you track down a copy of Quest of the curly-tailed horses. Monkman led an extraordinary life with tireless dedication and ambition who we could all learn a thing or two from, and his book gives a vivid insight into what life was like back then. He truly is someone worth remembering.

A few more details:

• Noel Monkman died in 1969
• He wrote another book, Escape to Adventure, which is next on my reading list.
• This is the only other description of Monkman’s life and works I’ve found online so far. Don’t read it until after you’ve finished Quest of the curly-tailed horses, otherwise it might spoil the ending.

When it comes to measuring the benefits of marine reserves (or Marine Protected Areas aka MPAs, or marine parks, or no take zones, or whatever you want to call them) it’s usually fish populations or marine habitats that we focus on. Now it seems that protecting areas of the sea from fishing pressure can very quickly help ocean predators – including penguins.

African penguins. Photo by ClifB

A new study from South Africa reveals that when a 20km stretch of ocean – not a lot really – was declared off-limits to fishing fleets, a local colony of African penguins spent on average 30% less time out fishing for themselves. Within 3 months of the fishing ban, the penguins found more to eat inside the protected area now that the human hunters weren’t competing for fish.

Spending less time hunting for their dinner is good news for penguins because it cuts down their exposure to other ocean predators that are partial to a penguin-dinner including great white sharks, orcas and cape fur seals.

African penguins. Photo by Paul Mannix

At the same time, another penguin colony 50km away weren’t so lucky. With no protection of their local fish stocks, they had to spend longer in the sea finding enough food for themselves and their youngsters.

African penguins are considered to be vulnerable to extinction, so it’s certainly very encouraging that they can benefit so rapidly from the careful siting of relatively small marine reserves.

Hopefully more reserves like this will be created to help secure the penguins’ future.

In detail:

• African penguins, also known as the black-footed penguin live on the SW coast of Africa.
• They are listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Redlist.
• Population declines are mainly blamed on overfishing of their target prey including sardines and anchovies by purse-seine fleets.
• In 2000, a catastrophic oil spill affected nearly half the entire population of African penguins and spawned the world’s largest sea bird rescue operation.
• The paper by Pichegru et al is published in the journal Biology Letters.

Did you know that the world’s largest coral atoll is British, and that it could become the world’s largest marine reserve?

View from Diego Garcia. Photo by sushicam

Those are two impressive facts and they apply to the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean, some 300 miles south of the Maldives.

The coral reefs of the chagos are among the most untouched and healthy reefs left on the planet, mainly because they happen to be a long way from any major human settlements.

I’m writing this post partly just to tell you about the Chagos – if you haven’t already heard of them – and also to ask for your help.

We have until Feb 12th – this Friday – to show support for the protection of the Chagos Archipelago and all the thousands of marine species that live there. The UK government – in a rare demonstration of expansive environmental thinking – is considering plans for a marine reserve that could cover 500,000 square kms. That is truly huge and far, far bigger than any other marine reserve anywhere today.

Containing hundreds of coral species and thousands of fish species (including, it’s thought, important tuna breeding grounds), this area is of extraordinary biodiversity value. And yes, as I’ve mentioned a few times already, this is the International Year of Biodiversity, so what better time to make this monumental pledge to the natural world.

Specifically, there are three proposals under consideration:

• Strict protection for the entire archipelago i.e. no fishing at all, anywhere
• Moderate protection for the entire area, with some deep sea fishing allowed
• Protection of only the “most important” areas of reef

Conservationists are united in their support for option one. Over 10,000 members of the public have already showed their support, signing a petition urging the UK government to Protect Chagos.

The Chagos archipelago is part of the British Indian Ocean Territories and consists of 55 islands, including Diego Garcia, home to a joint UK/US military base since the early 1970s when the native Chagosians were relocated to Mauritius and the Seychelles. This, quite rightly, stirred up a huge human rights debate that continues to rage on today.

I don’t mean to brush the human issues aside, but I’m not going to talk more about it in this post. Only, I do want to point out that plans for a marine reserve should not go against plans to allow Chagosians to return. If or when that happens, there is flexibility in the marine reserve plans to make allowances for the native islanders to come back and make a sustainable living from the seas around the archipelago. So this isn’t a case of people versus wildlife – there should be room (to some extent) for both.

Please join over 10,000 other people in signing a petition calling for the highest level of protection in the proposed marine reserve: no fishing at all.

I’ve signed it. And I urge you, dear, thoughtful, planet-loving readers, to do the same.

And don’t just take my word for it. Here is veteran environmental campaigner Tony Juniper saying much the same things as me.

As I mentioned in my last post, 2010 is the International Year of Biodiversity. And what better way to start things off than with a neat study from Florida telling us why some fish species are especially important.

This is the story of the red grouper.

Red grouper. by NOAA.

As their name suggest, these chaps are usually red. They can grow to over a metre from head to tail although 50cm (or nearly 2 feet) is more common. They can apparently live for up to 25 years, which is quite a lot for a fish. And like many other fish, red groupers are sex shifters: they are all born as females and after between 7 and 14 years they reajust their sexual organs, transforming into fully-functioning males.

The warm waters of the Caribbean Sea and central west Atlantic, between North Carolina and Brazil, are where the red groupers call home. And it now turns out these fish help to build and maintain their complex reefy  habitats.

“Red groupers are the Frank Lloyd Wrights of the sea floor” said the study co-author Susan Williams, from University California-Davis.

Red grouper. Photo by tiswango.

Felicia C. Coleman from Florida State University’s Coastal and Marine Laboratory led the study in the West Florida Shelf, sending both scuba divers and mini-subs down to spy on the red groupers. The researchers watched on as the fish got busy, digging great holes in the seabed to live in – up to a few metres wide and deep. The fastidious fish then keep their homes neat and tidy, ejecting mouthfuls of sand and sweeping the rocks clean with their tail.

In a series of experiments, the research team temporarily kept groupers away from their excavated abodes (by putting a cage around them), showing just how well they maintain their burrows.

And it turns out that this meticulous housekeeping creates important three-dimensional habitat that many other species rely on, giving a boost to biodiversity wherever red groupers are present; it clears areas of hard rock for corals and sponges to settle on and provides hiding places for spiny lobsters and dozens of other fish species including many that we like to eat such as snappers.

No-one has yet experimented with taking away red groupers permanently to test out this theory; somehow that doesn’t seem like a very good idea, these days.  But this study from Felicia Coleman and colleagues gives us a strong hint that all would not be well if red groupers were to disappear. In their own habitat-building way, they could well be what ecologists call “key-stone species”.

So, without the red groupers it seems likely that a whole host of other species would suffer.

And in the end that’s why red groupers really matter.

In detail:

• Red groupers – Epinephelus morio – are listed as Near Threatened on the IUCN Red List, which is a fairly low threat category but means they are certainly not safe. Many populations are considered to be overfished, especially parts of the Gulf of Mexico, and despite a few recoveries declines have been particularly bad in some areas.
• They are ambush predators, sneaking up on their prey and swallowing it whole, including shrimp, octopus, squid, fish and crabs.
• Other key-stone species include sea otters and starfish. They exert a disproportionate influence (for their size and abundance) on the rest of the ecosystem mainly because of their voracious appetites.

A pair of sea otters holding hands. Just too cute. Photo by joemess

• The red grouper paper can be downloaded for free from the Open Fish Science Journal.

I welcomed in the new decade under a stunning blue moon here in Cambridge, and it’s got me to wondering whether the brand new year, and decade, that lie ahead of us might also be full of other rare and beautiful things.

2009 was undoubtedly the year when more people than ever before began paying attention to the problems of climate change. It was incredible to see these issues climb so high in the international agenda, even if the outcome might not yet be what most of us were hoping for.

But has all the talk about climate change distracted us from many of the other threats to the natural world?

Biodiversity – the wonderful diversity of wild species and the threats they face from human actions – is an issue that has been patiently waiting in the wings, waiting for the UN to push in out onto centre stage in 2010. Because this year is the UN International year of biodiversity.

The question is, will the dwindling populations of so many important, breathtaking, extraordinary species command as much global attention in 2010 as the climate change debate did in 2009.

Perhaps, if we’re lucky.

Coming up in the following months are a few major international meetings that could decide the fate of some of the world’s wildlife.

The international trade in bluefin tuna – highly prized for Japanese sushi – could be banned in March at the latest conference of CITES – the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. Following the failure last November of management bodies to take bold steps to help stop these magnificent fish being hunted to extinction, CITES could be the bluefin tuna’s last hope. But will countries with a vested interest in the trade be prepared to vote for a ban? The pessimist in me says, not likely.

Bluefin tuna on sale in Tsukiji Market, Tokyo. Photo by Sanctu

Also on the agenda at the CITES meeting will be a group of sharks that conservationists fear are being driven towards extinction by demand for their meat and most notably their fins, to be made into the Asian delicacy sharks fin soup. I’ve been working for the last 6 weeks assessing the proposals to have hammerheads, oceanic whitetips, spiny dogfish and porbeagle sharks join a trio of awesome sharks that already have trade restrictions – the basking sharks, whale sharks and great white sharks.

Hammerhead shark. Photo by gnuru

I’ll be blogging more about sharks and tuna this year, so watch this space.

Then, November will see another landmark UN meeting and with it another opportunity to make global deals that could help secure the future of the planet, this time at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity.

Back at the Rio Earth summit in 1992 nations pledged to put a halt to the loss of biodiversity. And they were going to do it by 2010.

Everyone knows that this has not happened – no where near it. We are barely even starting to understand how human actions are affecting biodiversity, let alone figure out ways of stopping extinction.

So this meeting will be a tricky one, but could be vital if a way forward for global action against extinction is to be found.

But ultimately what I hope this coming year will do is help people appreciate why biodiversity matters, just like many people in 2009 began to realise why climate change matters.

The link between biodiversity loss and our own lives may not be as obvious as the threats from climate change, but there are so many ways in which we depend on healthy, diverse, functioning ecosystems. And that’s something else I’ll be writing about more this year.

For now, Happy New Year to you all. May 2010 be full of rare and beautiful things for us all.

Christmas is here and I couldn’t resist writing about one of the most festive ocean inhabitants, the Christmas Tree Worms.

Xmas tree worm. Photo by Alain76

It’s their outrageous headgear that gives the Christmas Tree worms their name. Most of the worm we don’t see. They hide their rather normal-looking segmented bodies inside boulders of coral. But each worm has a pair of frilly bits called radioles, which they poke out of their burrows to sift food and oxygen from the water.

These scuba-divers’ favourites can put on eye-popping multicoloured displays on coral reefs, like forests of miniature Christmas trees.

Xmas tree worms covering a coral boulder. Photo by will48324

Creep up slowly on one and it will stay out and let you peer closely at its extraordinary spiraled protuberances that can be yellow, orange, brown, blue, red, or white or almost any colour at all. Waft a current of water past them and they flicker out of sight. (I admit that I like to watch for a while, then play magician, waving my hand above them and watching them disappear).

Xmas tree worm. Photo by Tim Sheerman-Chase

So, how do these festive critters take up home in coral in the first place? Well, they may look like nothing but feather dusters, but these hermaphrodite worms come fully equipped with reproductive organs and from time to time will shed sperm and eggs into the sea in the hope they will collide with each other, mixing the gene pool up a little. The resulting larvae then drift through the water for a while before finding a patch of coral they like the look of, settling down and building a chalky tube to live in. The coral polyps then grow around the worm until it is embedded inside the coral skeleton.

And of course these critters don’t come out only at Christmas, but you can see them decorating reefs all year round.

Xmas tree worms. Photo by Nick Hobgood.

As well as looking irresistibly pretty, Christmas tree worms might help to protect corals from attack by canivorous crown-of-thorn starfish, shoeing away any hungry predators that get near, tickling and irritating their sensitive undersides.

Anyway, I think that’s enough facts for Christmas (although do scroll down to the end for some more if you want them), so I wish you all a very HAPPY CHRISTMAS 2009 and leave you with some more photos of these wonderful beasts. Enjoy!

Xmas tree worm. Photo by sarsifa.

Xmas tree worm. Photo by jtu.

Xmas tree worm. Photo by Nick Hobgood.

In detail:

• The Latin name for Christmas Tree worms is Spirobranchus giganteus meaning ‘enormous spiralled gills’. How apt.
• Christmas Tree worms are serpulids, a type of polychaete worm.
• Their radioles grow to about an inch tall.
• There are considered to be two subspecies of S. giganteus, one living in the Indo Pacific the other in the Atlantic and Caribbean. Both subspecies come in a range of colourmorphs.
• Study of the protective role of Christmas tree worms. De Vantier et al, 1986.
• Study of the different colours of Christmas tree worms. Song, 2006. The most popular colour is white.
• Christmas tree worms can live for over 40 years.

Now that I’m back from snowy adventures in the Swiss Alps (under the guise of giving a graduate seminar on science communication – not bad at all) I must tell you about the latest episode of the BBC’s Life series. Because this week they went underwater again, and it was brilliant.

Centre of attention were the invertebrates, a crazy diverse group of ocean critters that get up to all sorts of tricks and never fail to amaze.

Among them were big-brained Australian Giant Cuttlefish.

Giant australian cuttlefish. Photo by Jacob Bridgeman

We watch on as the huge males (up to half a metre long plus tentacles) attempt to woo the opposite sex by putting on a flashy colour display and getting in raucous fights with each other over who’s boss.

Less well-endowed cuttlefish males adopt a very different strategy for passing on their genes to the next generation: cross-dressing. Not very macho, admitedly, but it does the job nicely. By mimicking female colouration, the little males can wander into the mating arena without being chased off. The dominant male thinks he’s lucked out with another female showing up, while in fact the intruding male gets a chance to nip in and mate with the real female. Clever, eh?

Sticking with the cephalopods, we also revisit the Giant Pacific Octopus we met in the first taster episode.

Giant Pacific Octopus. Photo by Schristia

The female lays thousands of eggs inside a cave, tending them like a conscientious farmer tends his crops. It’s such a gargantuan effort for the female that as soon as her young have hatched, she dies. But now we discover that the story of the octopus doesn’t end there.

We get a glimpse of the gruesome reality of what goes on beneath the waves when a giant Sunflower Star (a huge variety of starfish) arrives on the scene – sped up by time-lapse photography – crawls into the cave and drags out the dead mother octopus using thousands of sucky tube feet. Sunflower Star plus a gang of other scavengers swarm over the dead body getting a good feed. It’s not pretty, but it is important, otherwise the oceans would soon fill up with dead octopodes lying about the place.

Sunflower Star. Photo by Ed Bierman

Scavenging echinoderms also make an appearance in an extraordinary Antarctic scene (you can watch this clip outside the UK). The time-lapse photography is simply stunning, as we watch the sea floor crawling with colourful starfish (and rather terrifying three-metre carnivorous worms). All very pleasant until we find out what brought them there: a dead baby seal. But like I said, the world needs its carrion-eaters, scavengers and recyclers to clear things up for us.

In this underwater episode of Life we also see jellyfish eating jellyfish, peep at some on the invertebrate wonders of the coral reefs (including boxer crabs – so cool!), and watch on as herds of spiny Spider Crabs gather together by the thousand to moult and, pairing up, they tumble across the floor in a tight mating clinch.

And I’m now convinced that I don’t ever want to find myself amid a gang of Humbolt squid. If ever there was a creature in the ocean to be a bit wary of, then these are most definitely them.

A razor-sharp, flesh-ripping beak and 70,000 hooks on each one: that’s quite enough to put me off. And it seems they are very clever beings, communicating with flashes of red across their bodies.

Humbolt Squid. Photo by MBARI 2006

But I would like to go diving beneath the Antarctic sea ice. Hang on for the making-of segment at the end of the episode to find out how the film crew took the astonishing footage of the starfish scavengers. An enormous drill makes a tunnel through eight-feet of ice, opening up an eerie blue doorway for the divers to plunge through to another world, somewhere I would certainly like to visit.

And so, once again, the BBC have gathered together some eye-popping footage that serves to remind us just how wonderful, diverse and surprising the oceans can be.

Thank you BBC.

A Caribbean seahorse has been found a long way from home.

The lined seahorse was identified on the other side of the Atlantic in the Azores. And chances are it got there clinging on to a floating life raft of vegetation, perhaps a palm tree that blew down in a storm.

Lined seahorse (Hippocampus erectus). Photo by House photography.

It’s the kind of pan-oceanic wandering that researchers have suggested must go on from time to time in the seahorse world and it goes some way to explain how seahorses have made their way to far flung corners of the oceans – quite a feat considering adult seahorses have only meagre swimming skills and as newborn larvae they don’t drift far before settling down onto the sea bed.

It is also possible that someone in the Azores has been keeping these Caribbean Lined Seahorses as pets and decided to let one go in the wild. But I prefer the rafting theory.

Lined Seahorse. Photo by Brian Gratwicke

The finding was made by Lucy Woodall from Royal Holloway at the University of London who is part of the Project Seahorse team that I write about in my book Poseidon’s Steed.

In chapter two, I write about genetic studies that hint at the seahorses’ long distance migrations. Scientists have interpreted molecular messages in the seahorses’ DNA which tell us that individual pregnant males (yes, that’s right, males) occasionally hook their strong, prehensile tails onto a clump of marine tumbleweed that drags them off to a distant shore where they pioneer a new seahorse population.

This new discovery in the Azores seems to back up those ideas.

But whether this was a intrepid pregnant male Lined seahorse they found so far from home, the researchers don’t say. They certainly don’t seem to think this species is about set up home in the Azores.

In detail:

• Lined seahorses, Hippocampus erectus, are normally found in the West Atlantic, all along the eastern seaboard of North America (up as far as Nova Scotia), through the Caribbean Sea and down to the east coast of South America, possibly as far south as Uruguay.
• They grow up to 19 cm from head to tail tip, making them one of the larger known seahorses, especially compared to a bunch of new pymgy seahorses discovered recently.
• See fishbase for more info.

As their name suggests, Goliath Groupers are really very big indeed. The largest known have been around 2.5m long, or 8 feet.

They are undeniably fully-fledged members of the marine megafauna.

But these big fish are in big trouble and they need your help.

Goliath Grouper. Photo by pony 33406

Because it’s become more and more difficult to spot one of these giants, the fish formerly known as jewfish. Being so very huge made them an irresistible target for fishers. Over the last few decades goliath groupers have been fished so heavily from their reefy and rocky homes on both sides of the Atlantic, in the Caribbean and the eastern reaches of the Pacific Ocean, that they are now labelled as being Critically Endangered.

In days gone by, a common place to spot a goliath grouper was strung up on a quayside alongside a grinning recreational fisher. So many goliath groupers were caught by sport and commercial fishers that their populations became economically extinct: it made no sense to try and catch them if you wanted to make money.

Goliath grouper catch from 1950s Florida. Photo from Florida Keys Public Libraries

Goliath grouper catch from 1950s Florida. Photo from Florida Keys Public Libraries.

Good news is that since the 1990 it’s been illegal to catch goliath groupers in US waters. And a fishing ban on them has been in place across the Caribbean since 1993. As a result, populations of these enormous fish have been slowly recovering.

The problem is they have apparently been recovering a bit too well for some people’s liking. There is growing pressure to lift the fishing ban in Florida, one of the only places where scuba divers have a good chance of meeting these kings of the reef. Do we really want to relive a time when killing such magnificent fish was all the rage? Couldn’t we move on from that?

In early December the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission will decide on whether to stick to the goliath grouper fishing ban or open these beasts up once again to human exploitation.

The Floridian scuba diving and conservation community are lobbying politicians hard in the hope they will hear a unified and loud voice of reason. An online petition to keep the fishing ban is gathering support and they hope to reach at least 1000 signatures.

So, do your bit and sign up. Because wouldn’t it be a crying shame if these spectacular beasts were once again allowed to be caught to make a bit of money or just for the fun of it.

Goliath grouper catch. Photo from Florida Keys Public Libraries.

It’s been well proven that big fish like the goliath grouper are far more vulnerable to extinction than smaller fish. In a twist of nature, it’s the bigger animals that grow more slowly and take longer to reach maturity (5 or 6 years for goliath groupers). So, if someone asks you to take a guess at which species are most at risk, whether they live in the sea, on land, or in freshwater, all you need do is pick out the biggest ones and you won’t go wrong.

In detail:

• Goliath groupers or jewfish (Epinephelus itajara) can live for nearly 40 years if we let them.
• They commonly grow to 1.5m from head to tail.
• Young goliath groupers live in mangrove forests, giving us yet another vital reason to care about and protect these habitats that are so often overlooked and cleared away.

This week an extract of my book Poseidon’s Steed was published in the Guardian, and the book is now available to buy in Europe from various online booksellers. So I thought it was time I blogged about my favourite fish.

One of the questions I get asked a lot is ‘Are seahorses endangered?’. And my answer is, sadly, yes they are.

Seahorses around the world are not only taken from the oceans (both deliberately and accidentally) in scarily high numbers, but they also suffer from the breakdown of their fragile habitats – especially coral reefs, seagrasses and mangroves.

So, what can we do about it? Well, here are my top ten tips for doing your bit to save the seahorses:

1. Don’t buy dead seahorses

This may sound a little odd. Why would you want a dead seahorse?

Because they live inside a coat of bony plates – which take the place of a more conventional suit of fishy scales – seahorses maintain much of their delicate and intricate shape after they die.

Obviously, it’s not quite the same, but much of the seahorses’ beauty lives on after death and there is something to be said for having your very own magical seahorse sitting on your desk (I must admit I have one on my desk, in a little cardboard jewelry box, given to me by a friend who’d had it for years – it must be a long time dead).

Dead seahorse by luv life

But don’t forget it is just the dead body of a fish that once led a quiet, gentle life on the sea floor.

Picking up a dead seahorse from the beach isn’t so bad. But the ones on sale in seaside souvenir shops will almost certainly have been taken live from the sea. So please, don’t buy them. The seahorses will thank you.

2. Make sure your pets were born on a farm

Following the publication of an extract of my book in the Guardian, a few readers have commented that keeping endangered seahorses might not be such a good idea. Have a read of chapter 5 of the book and you’ll find details of modern seahorse farms where seahorses are being bred for the aquarium trade.

Baby seahorses. Photo by pixiesticks23♥ (real busy)

So these days there is no excuse. Anyone who wants to keep these cute animals at home can do so without taking them from a wild.

In the book I also go through some of the pros and cons of keeping seahorses: for you, for seahorses, and for the environment. It’s not up to me to say if people should or shouldn’t keep seahorses – although I can see how lovely it would be to have live, beautiful seahorses in my life every day.

But if you want to keep them, make sure you go to reputable suppliers. Or check out online forums: home aquarists are often giving away spare baby seahorses that were born in their tanks. And this doesn’t just apply to seahorses; always choose captive bred not wild critters for your tank.

3. Don’t buy seahorse medicines

Again, this might sound odd.

Especially to anyone who isn’t familiar with the popular practice in various countries of using seahorses as an ingredient in traditional medicines.

Traditional Chinese medicine texts dating back 500 years prescribed seahorses for all sorts of medical conditions from broken bones and bed wetting, to skin rashes and even a flagging libido. Global demand for seahorse medicines is a driving force behind a growing market in seahorses taken from the sea – at least 25 million of them every year.

Dead seahorses on sale in a medicine shop in Vietnam. Photo by Helen Scales.

Especially worrying is the growing popularity of pre-packaged, off-the-shelf seahorse medicines that use weeny, dark-coloured seahorses that traditional Chinese medicine doctors normally don’t bother with. This means that now any seahorse, no matter what size or colour, can now be used in traditional medicines.

So, if you do use traditional medicines and can afford to buy seahorses (they aren’t cheap), then think about engaging your compassion for the natural world and choose an alternative that doesn’t include endangered species. Because there are lots of alternatives.

4. Protect the seahorses’ world

All sorts of human activities threaten the shallow coastal habitats that seahorses call home including coral reefs, seagrass meadows, mangroves, and estuaries. The list of problems is long and growing and includes pollution, habitat destruction, climate change, and ocean acidification.

And these are all things to worry about and take action over. Especially important is the creation of many more marine reserves or marine protected areas or marine parks or whatever you want to call them. Essentially these are places where the destructive influence of humankind is minimised, by banning fishing, extraction, direct input of pollutants and so on. Some strict marine reserves ban people altogether.

Healthy coral reef. Photo by Jiangang Luo Marine Photobank

There are obvioulsy problems that do not respect the boundaries of marine parks. But we know that protected habitats on the whole are healthier and can cope better when more insidious problems like climate change come along.

Currently less than 1% of the oceans are offered protection from human activities. That number needs to go up – a lot.

You may not have the power to set up your own marine reserve (who does?) but public support of local, regional, national and international campaigns to protect the oceans is vital for action.

5. Stamp out destructive fishing

A major threat to seahorses comes from trawl boats that plough through their habitat. Shrimp trawl boats don’t only catch shrimp but they also scrape up millions of seahorses every year (most seahorses made into traditional medicines are picked out of trawl nets), devastating their fragile habitats in the process. This insensitive, unselective form of fishing has to stop.

Trawl bycatch. Photo from Marine Conservation Cambodia/Marine Photobank

Do your bit by not buying fish that were caught in trawlers. How do you know, you cry? Well, you can ask. More and more these days, supermarkets and restaurants are giving customers information about how their fish is caught. If they don’t say and won’t tell you, then don’t buy.

Check out Monterey Bay Aquarium’s new Super Green List of fish that are good for you and not so bad for the oceans.

6. Take a stand against climate change

We may be releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere above our heads, but an awful lot of it ends up dissolved in the oceans where it’s already starting to wreak a particular brand of marine catastrophe. The oceans are becoming more acidic. And the seahorses – along with so many other marine creatures – are going to get hit hard, mainly because lots of them live in habitats that may soon be gone: coral reefs.

So don’t ignore the goings on in Copenhagan next month, because this really matters. Especially if you like the idea of a world with seahorses and coral reefs and other beautiful extraordinary wildlife.

And we can all do our bit to help. Switch off lights, turn down thermostats, insulate your house, recycle, drive less, fly less, ride your bike more. Get involved in campaigns like 350.org. And think of the seahorses while you do it.

7. Go see the seahorses

Aquariums around the world are home to thousands of seahorses and more of them than ever are bred in captivity and not taken from the wild (many aquariums swap baby seahorses when they have too many, which is often the case for the seahorses species that breed happily in tanks).

Seahorse and shrimp fish in an aquarium. Photo by Cal_gecko

Stop for a few minutes and watch the seahorses doing their seahorse thing, and let your thoughts wander off. When they come back, you’ll have your own personal seahorse moment to carry with you and remind you about these amazing creatures and the wild world they live in.

And have a read of the information boards at the aquarium. You never know what you might learn about the world of seahorses.

There’s a great new Secret Lives of Seahorses exhibit at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. But fear not, if you aren’t in California there are seahorse exhibitions all over the place.

8. Go dive for seahorses

If you are an addict of the underwater world like me, then there are heaps of places to go see a seahorse. Well, you can try anyway: they are extremely tricky to spot, with their cunning camouflage and shy nature.

Plus they are naturally rare creatures. You’ll not spot a big herd of them galloping by, but maybe – if you’re lucky – you might catch sight of a solitary seahorse grasping onto a blade of seagrass or coral branch. (Although, a friend of mine has just been diving in Indonesia and swears she saw a sea fan covered in dozens of pygmy seahorses. I’m not sure if she wasn’t just suffering from a case of nitrogen narcosis).

And you don’t have to venture to the tropics to see seahorses. Contrary to popular belief, seahorses inhabit shallow seas along virtually every coastline, tropical and temperate (but they don’t like really cold, icy waters, so don’t bother looking there).

Me and a seahorse. Photo by Steve Trewhella 2009.

A few weeks ago, I saw my first British seahorse off the beach at Studland in Dorset. Yes, that’s right. A British seahorse. There are two species on our fare but chilly shores.

Divers can play an important role in proving that a seahorse is worth more in the water than out. So, go out and support dive operations that care about their local seahorses.

And if you do spy a seahorse, try not to hassle it, poke it, prod it, or blind it with camera flash.

In this picture I am holding onto Troy (or rather, he is holding on to me), but I must point out, I was diving with a licensed seahorse handler (the UK species are now protected). We were conducting a survey, taking down this guy’s vital statistics, and stopped just quickly for an unmissable photo opportunity!

Check out chapter 6 of Poseidons’ Steed for more seahorse spotting tips.

9. Send in your seahorse sightings

Do your bit for seahorse research by getting involved with local seahorse spotting projects. The British Seahorse Survey collects reports of seahorse sightings from across the British Isles – and that goes for live seahorses in the water and dead seahorses too.

Get your seahorse spotting reports in!

10. Spread the seahorse love

And finally… (as they say on the news)

Recycled cashmere seahorse by snaulkter

Raspberry seahorse by snaulkter

I recently discovered these gorgeous cuddly seahorses made from recycled materials by a brilliant artist/designer snaulkter.

They are simply the most adorable – and accurate – depictions of seahorse in fabric that I’ve seen (and trust me, over my years of being a seahorse fanatic friends have given me virtually every beanie baby and cuddly seahorse ever made!). And I love that they are made from reused fabrics. Perfect!

So go get the kids hooked on seahorses, or indulge a grown up’s passion. Each seahorse is a unique critter, and each one is beautiful. Go see for yourself…

So… there you have my top 10 suggestions of how to help save seahorses. I’d love to hear you thoughts of any other things we can do.