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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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?

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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).

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.

Seadragons. Is there anything more mythical and magical than these guys?

I’ve not been lucky enough to see a seadragon in the wild yet, although next time I’m in Australia I’m determined to find one.

But we can all enjoy the ornate beauty of the weedy seadragons – covered in their dapper suits of yellow spots – in the next episode of the BBC’s Life series. You can already peer at their moving mating ritual on a clip on the BBC website. This might be first time wild weedies have been caught at it on camera, so this is definitely worth 3 minutes of your next coffee break.

Quite gorgeous and a little bit hard to believe.

The violin and piano music is the perfect accompaniment, along with the warmth Sir David Attenborough’s narration. The whole thing plays out like some sort of beautiful undersea ballet.

There are two species of seadragon – the weedy and leafy varieties – both members of the same family as seahorses (the syngnathidae), both with the most extraordinary camouflage which they use to hide away among seaweed forests in the mostly chilly waters along Australia’s southern coast.

From the BBC clip you can see the male weedy seadragon doing a great job of carrying the eggs around, safely stuck onto his belly, but he is not truly pregnant like the seahorse males. Instead of giving birth, the male seadragons simply stands by while the eggs hatch and the minute seadragons waft off to begin their own, independent lives.

Another clip on Arkive shows baby leafy seadragons making their way into the world.

These days, many seadragons are taken from the wild to put on display in aquariums all over the world. Attempts to persuade them to breed in captivity have so far been fairly unsuccessful. It seems these elegant dragons are choosy about how and where they mate.

But I can’t deny that watching these beautiful fish up close is a truly captivating experience.

Obviously, we mustn’t take too many of them from the wild. And whenever you see one in an aquarium, don’t forget their cousins roaming the southern shores of Australia, living in habitats threatened by pollution, climate change and all those other modern ocean problems.

If ever there were an animal that could persuade us to protect the seas, the seadragons must be a very strong candidate.

Because surely the world is a better place knowing there are real, live dragons lurking in the oceans.

If you’ve been watching my tweets lately, you’ll probably already have noticed I like to link to ocean stories from around the web.

So I thought I’d give you some thoughts on my favourite ocean tweets from the past week.

For starters, it seemed to be a week of great seahorse fecundity with the announcement of baby seahorses being born in two English aquariums. We had spotted or yellow seahorses in Chester – a species native to the Indo-Pacific.

And then the patter of tiny fins could be heard in Hastings with the arrival of 200 baby short snouts. These are European seahorses that live around the UK coastline and down into the Mediterranean.

Seahorses have been having babies in British aquariums since Victorian times, so this is nothing especially new. But it obviously still exciting.

As I discuss in Poseidon’s Steed, keeping seahorses in aquariums helps spread the word about these extraordinary creatures and of course raises awareness about the problems they face in the wild. And with breeding programmes like these two, and many others around the world, aquariums don’t have to rely on wild caught seahorses for their displays.

On a more worrying note, if you haven’t already, then take 30 seconds out of your day to watch a video on the Guardian website showing the sea ice at the north pole shrinking from 1978 to 2008.

Back in the late seventies, satellites first started taking pictures from space of the extent of sea ice over the arctic. Since then, the sea ice has fluctuated annually but overall has been contracting, with 2009 being the 3rd lowest extent on record.

And despite the slight recovery from 2008, scientists are still convinced that in the next few years the arctic will become completely ice-free during the summer.

Believe what you will about climate change, but this to me is stark evidence of the changes that have been taking place in the environment in the past few decades, and a worying sign of the changes still to come.

And finally…

This week we saw a cheery bit of ocean trivia. A video of bottlenose dolphins getting up to some strange jellyfish tricks has been doing the rounds.

The footage came from Tremadog Bay in Wales, and you can see the researchers onboard laughing themselves silly at the spectacle.

It’s not too obvious on the video clip but when the dolphins got a good aim, they flipped  the jellyfish clear out of the water.

It’s behaviour that’s never been see before, but perhaps goes some way to explaining why captive dolphins know what to do when a beach ball is thrown at them.

And why are they doing it? Well, who knows. I’d like to think they were just having a bit of fun.

Thanks for reading. More from me and the ocean world soon.