Recently, I published a paper giving a round up of the latest seahorse studies and it reminded me of the revelations that have emerged from the seahorse world since I wrote Poseidon’s Steed, the story of seahorses from myth to reality.

So, here is are a few of the things we now know about seahorses, things that we didn’t know when my book went to press, and a few updates especially for readers who want to know what happened next…

Baby seahorse fossils discovered

When I wrote Poseidon’s Steed, no fossils of extinct seahorses had ever been found. And now they have, and they were just babies when they died.

Jure Žalohar stumbled on them in a stream in Slovenia while hunting for fossil insects. Among the fossils are juvenile seahorses just 5mm long – they look like eye lashes cast in stone.

The fossil find led to the naming of  two extinct species. One is Hippocampus sarmaticus, named after the era in Earth’s history when it lived. It looked a little like modern-day three spot seahorses, only with a very long tail.

And then there’s Hippocampus slovenicus, named after the country it was found in. This one looked more like the stumpy, knobbly Bargibant’s pygmy seahorse of today.

(These fossils did make it into my book, but back then the new species had yet to be identified).

Bargibants pygmy seahorse. Photo by Stephen Childs

Illegal seahorse trade rages on

A study by Vincent Nijman showed that between 1998-2007, around 16 million seahorses were exported from Southeast Asia (along with millions of other wild animals). Over 90% of them came from Thailand, and over half were destined for Hong Kong. Most of them were taken from the wild and were traded dried to make into traditional medicines.

But that is a huge underestimate of the total trade since these are only the seahorse transactions that were officially reported to the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). Before 2004, reporting seahorse trade was purely voluntary but even now there seems to be a lot of unreported trade.

And don’t forget, this is just Southeast Asia – admittedly, this is a major source of seahorses, but not the only place they are traded from.

Photo by Fa11ing away

Nijman writes about an illegal consignment of 1-2 million seahorses picked up in Poland that came from Indonesia – a country that reports virtually no official seahorse trade.

So it seems we can’t fully comprehend the impacts of the seahorse trade.

Until we get a good idea of where seahorses are being caught and who is buying them, conservation efforts will continue to face major hurdles.

Seahorses are even older

In Poseidon’s Steed I wrote that seahorses first evolved around 16.5 million years ago – relatively recently in the grand scheme of life on earth.

But we now have new evidence to suggest they are older than that. We can now push back the beginnings of the seahorse lineage to at least 25 to 28 million years.

Yellow seahorse (Hippocampus kuda). Photo by Wildsingapore

Two researchers, Peter Teske and Luciano Beheregaray, peered into the past and used genetic sequences to figure out when seahorses last shared a common ancestor with their close relatives, the pygmy pipefish.

This ancient split pinpoints when seahorses first swam with their heads held high. Their radical heads-up trendsetting happened at around the same time in the Oligocene era when shallow marine habitats were opening up and seagrasses were spreading across the oceans.

So it makes perfect sense that seahorses invented a new swimming stroke, using their tails to hold on tight and their little fins to maneuver expertly through the complex, three dimensional world of seagrasses.

Seahorse males prefer larger ladies

Female seahorses can keep their stiletto heels on, because it turns out males choose to mate with the largest females they can find.

Choosy males picking out large partners is such a strong selective pressure for big-bellied seahorses that females have evolved to be 15-20% bigger than the opposite sex.

Deepwater Horizon spells bad news for Caribbean seahorses

It’s too soon to weigh up the ecological impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. But the delicate seagrass and coral reef habitats that the Caribbean seahorses call home are undoubtedly in grave danger.

Seahorse farmers in Hawaii are already stocking up on dwarf seahorses, with the plan to release them in Florida to restock areas once the threat has passed.

Deepwater Horizon fire. US Coast Guard/Marine Photobank

Take another look in chapter 4 to see what I had to say about restocking the oceans with captive bred seahorses. That all still holds.

But perhaps, if there really is a seahorse disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico, and once things have been cleaned up, then maybe we should step in to encourage seahorses back. But it is vital that we first wait and see whether the seahorses manage to survive on their own – and in the meantime take a long hard look at what we are doing to the world.

Seahorse cruisers

I already blogged about the Caribbean seahorse that was found half way across the Atlantic, in the Azores – backing up theories that seahorses cruise around the oceans, clinging onto life rafts of drifting vegatation.

Golden seahorse brooch is still missing

There is still no news of the whereabouts of the Lydian golden seahorse brooch.

Seahorses are masters of disguise. They really are. They can grow a coat of weedy sprouts and change their skin colour to seemlessly match their surroundings. No wonder a cuttlefish recently mistook a seahorse for a blade of seagrass and covered it in eggs, as seen in this video on the BBC news website.

The egg-laden seahorse was caught on camera by underwater cameraman Manuel Enrique Garcia Blanco in Spain while working with PhD researcher Fiona Read.

But this isn’t the first time a seahorse has been used as an impromptu cuttlefish nursery.

A frogman with his bathers hung with hand-grenades? And a seller of toy balloons? From Gilbert and Allan, The Sea-horse and its relatives, 1958

While researching my book Poseidon’s Steed I tracked down a copy of the 1958 book The Sea-Horse and its relatives by Gilbert Whitley and Joyce Allan from the Australian Museum in Sydney (it wasn’t easy – the British Library and University College London copies have both gone missing. In the end I found a second hand copy on amazon – my copy once beloned to the Patchogue Medford library – complete with library ticket, last borrowed on 9th August 1982. It has that wonderful old book smell).

It’s a lovely book, filled with stories, science and illustrations including a “century” of species, many of which are now considered to by synonyms.

When I saw the BBC video clip I immediately remembered a drawing in Gilbert and Allan’s book. It shows two seahorses that have met a similar fate.

Gilbert and Allan tell a “Nursery Story for Adults” with a rather unhappy ending. In 1948, German naturalist, Heinrich Dathe, wrote about his discovery of a dead seahorse washed up on an Italian shore, its body covered in cuttlefish eggs. He assumed the poor seahorse – resembling a seller of toy balloons – must have passed away, encumbered by his unusual load.

But this wasn’t the first time Dr Dathe found evidence of a cuttlefish mistaking a seahorse for a piece of seagrass. While imprisoned in a concentration camp in  Rimini, Southern Italy, a friend presented him one day with a glass jar, filled with seawater and containing its own, miniature prisoner.

On closer inspection, it was a seahorse decorated in miniature bunches of grapes, slung about its midriff like a pair of bathing trunks festooned with hand-grenades. It was another seahorse covered in cuttlefish eggs.

So it seems that seahorses put on such flawless seagrass impersonations they run the risk of ending up with very dangerous underwear.

And fortunately, there was a much happier ending for the Spanish seahorse caught on camera with its young cuttlefish hitchhikers. This one survived its ordeal thanks to Garcia Blanco and Read who carefully removed the eggs from its tail and let the seahorse go on its way.

Now that’s got to be a nursery story worth passing on.

The votes are in and the future does not look bright for a collection of marine species that are getting a pummeling from international trade. Fans of bluefin tuna sashimi and anyone outraged at the idea of taking a global stance against shark fin soup can heave a sigh of relief. Don’t worry: it’s business as usual.

Hammerhead shark. Photo by petersbar

In the build up to the 15th biannual meeting of CITES held in Doha, hopes had been high among some conservationists (I was one of them) that protection might be granted to some of the most threatened marine species that cruise the oceans in ever decreasing numbers thanks to human appetite for sushi, soup, and shark steaks.

But alas no. Despite all the scientific evidence that points towards extinction-by-overfishing, nations at the CITES meeting voted overwhelmingly not to offer any of these species international protection.

The trade in fins and meat will carry on regardless of massive, worldwide declines. Same goes for the imperiled bluefin tuna.

Porbeagle steaks on sale in Borough Market London. Photo by pfig

At the end of 2009 I helped research and write scientific reviews for IUCN and TRAFFIC of proposals to restrict international trade in 4 shark species: Oceanic whitetips, hammerheads, porbeagles and spiny dogfish (4 other sharks were also to be protected under the hammerhead proposal since their fins and meat are difficult to tell apart).

So, I’ve been through the data and I know the stories of all these sharks. And, trust me, they need all the help they can get.

The aim of these reports was to provide an expert analysis of the proposals to regulate and control the trade these sharks. We summarized the data and tried to make it easy for nations at the CITES meeting to make balanced and informed decisions.

I’ve seen the porbeagle and spiny dogfish data before – these 2 were rejected at the 2007 CITES meeting too. It leaves me wondering if the same species will keep coming up at CITES, time after time, until their numbers are so low they can be safely labelled as being “commercially extinct” i.e. don’t bother going out to try and catch them.

Oceanic whitetip shark. Photo by Tom Weilenmann

This latest round of CITES negotiations on marine species has been the most public and – from where I’m sitting – the most frustrating and depressing.

When I set out to review the CITES shark proposals alongside a team of other wildlife trade experts, it wasn’t a forgone conclusion and certainly not simply a case of “save the sharks no matter what the science says”. We rigorously and objectively analyzed each species against the strict criteria set by CITES and – trust me – I could only wish the picture had been less clear cut and less desolate.

To be eligible for a trade ban under CITES, species of “commercially exploited aquatic species” (including sharks and tuna) need to have declined by somewhere between 80 and 95% from a historic baseline or by just 50% more recently.

If trade looks to be threatening the survival of a species in the wild but they don’t yet meet these thresholds, then less strict trade regulations can be imposed in the hope they will stave off the need for a trade ban.

And shockingly all these sharks – except possibly a few populations of spiny dogfish that remain in reasonable shape - and bluefin tuna fall well within the trade ban criteria.

I won’t repeat all the data here (if you want to know more, do check out the IUCN/TRAFFIC review documents) but here are a few of the more worrying statistics:

• Since the 1950s, oceanic whitetip sharks in the NW Atlantic and Central Pacific have declined by between 90-99%.
• Since the 19th century, hammerhead sharks and porbeagles in the Mediterranean have both plummeted by 99.9%.
• In the NE Atlantic, it took 82 years for porbeagle populations to collapse to 6% of their former abundance.
• Between 1905 and 2005, the population of spiny dogfish in the NE Atlantic population declined by 93.4 – 94.8%.

And I’ve not  just taken the juiciest pickings of the data to try and make a point. Similar stories of demise have been going on across the ranges of these sharks.

Nevertheless all this science, all the fisheries statistics, models and projections have been ignored.

Spiny dogfish. Photo by brotherM

The CITES criteria are not only based on population declines. The biology of the species is also taken into account: species that are more biologically vulnerable should, according to CITES, be protected more carefully.

And sharks are some of the most vulnerable fish in the oceans. They tend to grow slowly, mature late, produce a small number of young, and live a long time.

During my research I was astonished to learn that spiny dogfish probably have the longest gestation of any vertebrate in the world. Female spiny dogfish are pregnant longer than us human beings and longer than elephants or whales. They can gestate for up to 22 months, and even after all that waiting they may only give birth to a handful of pups. That doesn’t add up to a species that will cope well with commercial exploitation.

Hammerhead shark. Photo by Erik Charlton

One big question that many people are currently debating is whether CITES is the right tool for conserving marine species, including sharks.

Some say this is the job of regional fisheries organizations (like ICCAT). The most vocal on this are China and Japan who seem adamant that CITES should keep their sticky beaks out.

Others say CITES lacks legal bite and with so many opt-out clauses has little effect on the species in real danger.

Nevertheless, there are a handful of sharks that have managed to get onto the CITES appendices.

At a landmark vote back in 2002, basking sharks and whale sharks were the first elasmobranchs to earn themselves international regulation, followed by great white sharks in 2004, and a trade ban in sawfish – a close relative of sharks – in 2007.

But where next for ocean trade?

Right now, I really don’t know. My only hope is that all this attention and the mixed views being spread around the media will mean that the plight of the sharks and bluefin tuna – members of that unseen and largely uncared for marine world – will be higher on the interntional agenda and maybe those regional fisheries organizations will get their act together and do their job properly.

Of course as consumers we can all boycott bluefin and shark (ask where your fish and chips came from – it could be a spiny dogfish female who’s been pregnant for 2 years). But I fear that might not be enough. International, top-down action will probably be needed too.

And if we don’t do something there might not be any more bluefins and even fewer sharks to haggle over the next time CITES comes around.

This week, international negotiations are raging over a group of species that conservationists say are being pushed towards extinction. The cause of the problem: uncontrolled trade.

Votes are already coming in and the first big result is a NO VOTE on a potential ban trade in Bluefin Tuna. The trade will go on. Japan must be thrilled.

Inside a net with a shoal of doomed bluefin tuna. Photo by Marco Carè Marine Photobank

The plan – proposed by Monaco – had been to add the Atlantic Bluefin Tuna to appendix I of CITES – the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species of wild fauna and flora.

Every two years, CITES members meet to decide which species should be added, removed, or upgraded on their lists that offer endangered animals and plants protection from international trade. Appendix I means a global trade ban. Appendix II means global regulation, aimed  to keep the trade well within sustainable limits.

If the tuna vote had been Yes, it would have put a halt – for now – on legal trade in Bluefins from the Atlantic. Who knows what the consequences might have been: the black market might have carried on supplying anyone who wanted sushi. A new breed of sushi tourism might have opened up in Mediterranean countries that catch Bluefins (this was going to be a ban on international trade, not on catching them).

But Japan, Canada and a number of poorer nations voted against the proposal. And so the trade will continue, and we’ve missed a chance to help make sure there will still be Bluefins cruising the Atlantic in years to come.

Bluefin in a cage. Photo by Marco Carè Marine Photobank

And this is all despite overwhelming evidence that there are now few enough of these fish left in the oceans to meet CITES’ stringent rules for a global trade ban.

Many claim that the tuna is being watched over by ICCAT – the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, so CITES isn’t needed. But perhaps a more appropriate acronym could be the International Conspiracy to Catch All Tunas.

ICCAT set annual catch limits based on scientific data. These are not low enough and are often exceeded.

If you want a balanced and thorough overview of the Bluefin situation, I urge you to have a read of IUCN and TRAFFIC’s review of the CITES proposal to ban the trade. They have crunched a huge volume of data and offer a neat summary of the whole deal.

There’s a small chance the Bluefin No vote will be overturned at the end of the meeting. But it doesn’t seem likely.

We’ll have to wait and see if the Bluefins turn up again in the next round of CITES discussions in 2 years time.

Meanwhile, there are other threatened marine species under the CITES spotlight this week. A group of shark species have been proposed for trade regulation – not ban – under CITES. They include Oceanic Whitetips and Hammerhead sharks, both heavily exploited for their fins.

Oceanic Whitetip Shark. Photo by Michael Aston

I’ll be watching especially closely, since I was involved in writing reviews of the CITES shark trade proposals.

I can only hope these opportunities to help protect ocean biodiversity won’t also be thrown away.

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.

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.

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.

Tonight it was the turn of fish to take centre stage on the BBC’s Life. And what an episode it was… absolutely, by far the best yet.

Clown fish. When the head female of an anemone dies, the biggest male has a sex-change & becomes the new dominant female. Photo by ecatoncheires.

Honestly. Trust me. You have to see this one. The early episodes had moments of eyebrow-raising novelty and breathtaking beauty, but so far none of them have truly enthralled me from start to finish. Until now.

And yes, it was about fish, so I’m a bit biased. But really, if anything, I was more likely to say “seen it” to whatever the BBC marched out on my screen.

What we see is scene after scene of surprises, extraordinary behaviour, and frankly stunning spectacles. We have freshwater barbel fish picking the muck off herds of grateful hippos. I never knew this sort of thing went on. Cleaning wrasse and shrimp oncoral reefs, sure. But hippos? Really! The hippos even open up those lethal jaws of theirs and have themselves a fastidious tooth clean.

Then there are the gobies that use their lips to climb up vast, roaring Hawaiian waterfalls. A few of the bravest individuals make it to glorious mountainous pools – fishy heaven. Only, their babies get swept back down the waterfall and out to sea, and the whole, exhausting process starts over again.

There are gorgeous slow motion shots of flying fish. Seeing these guys in real life is such a treat and wierder than you can ever imagine. But why not? Some birds swim don’t they? So why shouldn’t fish take to the air?

But crazier still is when the flying fish start getting together to make more flying fish. On camera, they cast their prodigious eggs and sperm onto a floating palm frond (which I suspect the film crew put there): so much that some of the fish start getting stuck in it and die. Yuck!

Flying fish eggs as sushi. Apparently some people like to eat this stuff. Photo by Roger Jones.

Imagine if you will, that when these fish start getting it on, they can produce enough gametes to sink a boat! The “behind the lens” section at the end of the programme showed a worried captain heaving a massive lump of sticky orange fish goo off the deck after the fish started spawning on his boat. The film crew make a hasty exit. (Also catch the hilarious scenes where the flying fish fly right into the camera team on their little boat).

This episode was especially poingnant for me, because I might have been involved in filming it. I’m not disgruntled that I didn’t get a chance to hob-knob with BBC film crews (although that would I’m sure have been a blast). But I’m miserable because the fish I wanted to take the BBC to film have apparently all gone.

For my PhD I studied I huge species of coral reef fish called the Napoleon wrasse or humphead wrasse (Cheilinus undulatus).

A fully grown male Napoleon wrasse. Photo by bananeman.

These are probably the biggest bony fish that live on tropical reefs and can grow up to nearly 2m long – it would tricky fitting one in a bath tub.

In this episode of Life we see snappers spawning in huge aggregations (these particular aggregations in the Caribbean attract whale sharks who come to feed on the resulting egg soup). Napoleon wrasse do this too. Or at least they used to at a site in the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea where I studied their spawning aggregations.

Every day when the aggregation formed, I went a long to film these giant fish. Then later on, back in Cambridge, I studied the footage and identified individual fish returning to the site day after day, recognising them from the unique patterns of scribbles and lines each one has on its face. Napoleon wrasse, as I discovered, come stamped with an individual faceprint.

Napoleon wrasse scribbles, like a human fingerprint. Photo by Peter Nangle.

Then, after I’d finished my PhD, a few years ago now (that’s how long it takes to film these series) I was contacted by a member of the Life team who suggested we go to the remote island where I did my PhD to film the spawning wrasse once again – this time with proper cameras, and not the sony handicam I used for my research.

It was all looking good until an email came through saying he’d heard that the wrasse were all gone: rumour had it that they’d been taken away to be sold in expensive Asian restaurants, another subject I studied for my PhD.

After following the intimate love lives of individual, gorgeous fish, my Napoleon wrasse have all gone.

Napoleon wrasse eye. Photo by tetzi.

So, all in all, I love this episode of Life. It reminds me why I do what I do. The oceans are beautiful and staggering and still, after all these years that I’ve got to know them, they can take my breath away.

But they also can make me very, very sad.

At least there were some beautiful dancing dragons to help cheer me up.

Oh, and how could I forget. They showed footage of a fish called the sarcastic fringehead. For real.