Elusive World of Sea Horses

Talking of Sea Horses, when I was a young boy, I thought they were mythical animals like dragons or unicorns and even till a few days back, other than the name and their looks, hardly knew anything about these quirky little fish like creatures.
Last week I was shown these pictures and an underwater video of Sea Horses by one of my colleagues. As I have mentioned earlier about him here at times, he dives almost every Friday in Mesaieed and feeds his favorite fish. Last few weeks he had been filming Sea Horses.
To know more about them, I researched and found an article by a marine life biologist, Amanda Vincent, which she wrote after years of following Sea Horses in their wild habitat. You may like to know some interesting facts about their habits…
- The genus of Sea Horses belongs to the Pipefish family and presently some 35 species are found in warm and temperate seas.

- They are very good in blending themselves with the surroundings by growing skin tendrils and becoming shrouded with algae and other sea plants. Some species can change color of their body to match with the surroundings, like orange, green, white, red or purple or whatever it takes to save them from predators.

- In the mating season, males become eager to mate. They are more active than females in courtship competitions and may enter into fierce fights with rival males. During such fights, the weaker male would often turn his color dark and flatten his body on the sea-bed accepting his defeat.

- In one breeding season, starting October lasting until next April, their relationship is purely monogamous.

- Sea Horses are resolutely faithful to their partners. If one of them gets seriously injured by a predator, the victim’s partner would shun all suitors for weeks and wait for the partner to recover.

- No male animal on earth is known to be more specialized for parental care than the male Sea Horse. The female deposits her eggs inside a pouch on the male’s tail that takes care of the embryos till birth. The male moves around with a fat pouch nurturing his babies for three weeks before releasing a string of miniature sea horses after about three weeks.

- The pregnant male doesn’t travel long distances for food but the female moves around. They meet at least once a day and when they do, they show their affection towards each other by changing their colors from drab brown to creamy yellow.

- The male sea horse does all the parenting and his pregnancy closely resembles that of in mammals. The hormone ‘Prolactin’ which stimulates milk production in women, also governs Sea Horse pregnancy.

- If by any chance the female gets killed or eaten by any predator, the male first waits to deliver the babies and then courts other widows to start a new relationship.

- The female’s body deflates when she transfers eggs and the male’s pouch inflates; as these changes happen almost simultaneously, there is absolutely no chance of divorce, cheating or any kind of infidelity.

- Many species of Sea Horses have been declared endangered. Today China is the biggest consumer of Sea Horses in the pharmaceutical sector as most of Chinese aphrodisiacs are made out of Sea Horses.