SEAHORSE

Chivalry, Protection

When someone receives a Seahorse totem,
their own sense of chivalry is awakened.
The protection of the young and those
weaker than themselves.

Seahorse people should pay
attention to a "two-week" time period
for their endeavors.

The Seahorse also brings forth a time of romance.
For women, time to choose her mate and for men, a time to seek
out the right woman and court her.

A person with a Seahorse totem should ask themselves these questions:
Is it time to reverse roles: to be the provider or the nurturer?
Do I need to be more responsive to my partner?
Am I providing enough protection for my loved ones?

Seahorses also facilitate contact with Water Spirits
who may take mortals into their favor and under their protection.
Seahorses can be the bridge between the Spirit Water World and the Living World.

http://www.seahorse.com/

Seahorse Hippocampus

Seahorses are truly unique, and not just because of their unusual equine shape. Unlike most other fish, they are monogamous and mate for life. Rarer still, they are among the only animal species on Earth in which the male bears the unborn young.

Found in shallow tropical and temperate waters throughout the world, these upright-swimming relatives of the pipefish can range in size from 0.6 inches (1.5 centimeters) to 14 inches (35 centimeters) long.

Male seahorses are equipped with a brood pouch on their ventral, or front-facing, side. When mating, the female deposits her eggs into his pouch, and the male fertilizes them internally. He carries the eggs in his pouch until they hatch, then releases fully formed, miniature seahorses into the water.

Because of their body shape, seahorses are rather inept swimmers and can easily die of exhaustion when caught in storm-roiled seas. They propel themselves by using a small fin on their back that flutters up to 35 times per second. Even smaller pectoral fins located near the back of the head are used for steering.

They anchor themselves with their prehensile tails to sea grasses and corals, using their elongated snouts to suck in plankton and small crustaceans that drift by. Voracious eaters, they graze continually and can consume 3,000 or more brine shrimp per day.

Population data for most of the world’s 35 seahorse species is sparse. However, worldwide coastal habitat depletion, pollution, and rampant harvesting, mainly for use in Asian traditional medicine, have made several species vulnerable to extinction.

Seahorse The seahorse belongs to the same family as pipefishes and sea dragons. There are 35 different species which can be found in warm shallow waters all over the world. The head of the seahorse resembles a horse's head, and its body has an elongated tail covered by about 50 rectangular bony plates. 'Hippocampus' is the scientific name for the seahorse, and it means bent horse in Greek.

Seahorses are the 'new men' of the oceans. They’re unique in that the male gives birth to the young and takes all responsibility for parental care! The female deposits her eggs into a special brood pouch on the male. He then incubates them for a month before giving birth to up to a thousand tiny babies. The tiny seahorses are then on their own and have to fend for themselves.

Seahorses choose just one partner during their lifetime and are slow to find another mate if their first partner disappears or dies. They perform greeting dances every morning to confirm their bond.

The seahorse's long tube-like snout acts like a vacuum cleaner for food, sucking up tiny shrimp and crustaceans. It is able to hang on to sea grass by wrapping its tail around the stems. This helps it to avoid being swept away by strong currents.

Like chameleons, seahorses can change colour so they match their surroundings in the seagrass. This camouflage protects them from predators such as crabs although, with their bony armour, there are very few animals that can eat them anyway.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/seahorse/

http://projects.edtech.sandi.net/encanto/seahorses/facinatinghorse.html

Many people don't believe that seahorses are real animals. If you look at them, you can't help but think the same thing. Yet, seahorses, with their enchanting and almost magical appearance, are simply a type of fish.

Is It Really a Horse?A Seahorse's Body PartsA Seahorse's SizeSeahorse DadsSeahorse SurvivalMy Seahorse

It measures about 3 centimeters in length.

In most families the female is the one who has the babies.

Seahorses are different:

Even though 100 babies are born at one time, only a few grow-up to be adults.

A Seahorse's ability to hide is one way it can survive. This is called camouflage.

Seahorses are vertebrate fish. Technically, their taxanomic classification is the Kingdom Animalia, Phylum Chordata, Sub-phylum Vertebrata, Class Osteichthyes and Order Perciformes. They belong to the family Syngnathidae (syn - together or with [Greek] and gnathos - jaw [Greek]) which includes seadragons, pipefishes and pipehorses. Seahorses make up the genus Hippocampus (hippo - horse [Greek] and campos - sea animal [Greek]). They live in warm or temperate salt water off the coasts of Australia and the United States. They make their homes in reefs and seaweed. They are typically found at depths between .5 - 30 meters. In the reefs and seaweed, they have good protection from predators as well as a plenty of twigs to anchor themselves to.

See text for species.

Seahorses are a genus of fish belonging to the family Syngnathidae, which also includes arangatanes. The arangatane and seahorse are found in tropical waters all over the Caribbean, Great Barrier Reef, and Mexico

Seahorses range in size from 16 mm (the recently discovered Hippocampus denise^[2]) to 35 cm. Seahorses and pipefishes are notable for being the only species in which males become "pregnant".^[3]

The seahorse has a dorsal fin located on the lower body and pectoral fins located on the head near their gills. Some species of seahorse are partly transparent and are rarely seen in pictures.

Sea dragons are close relatives of seahorses but have bigger bodies and leaf-like appendages which enable them to hide among floating seaweed or kelp beds. Seahorses and sea dragons feed on larval fishes and amphipods, such as small shrimp-like crustaceans called mysids ("sea lice"), sucking up their prey with their small mouths. Many of these amphipods feed on red algae that thrives in the shade of the kelp forests where the sea dragons live.

Seahorses reproduce in an unusual way: the male becomes pregnant. "The female inserts her ovipositor into the male’s brood pouch, where she deposits her eggs, which the male fertilizes. The fertilized eggs then embed in the pouch wall and become enveloped with tissues."^[4] New research indicates the male releases sperm into the surrounding sea water during fertilization, and not directly into the pouch as was previously thought.^[5] Most seahorse species' pregnancies lasts approximately two to three weeks.

Hatched offspring are independent of their parents. Some spend time developing among the ocean plankton. At times, the male seahorse may try to consume some of the previously released offspring. Other species (H. zosterae) immediately begin life as sea-floor inhabitants (benthos).

Seahorses are generally monogamous, though several species (H. abdominalis  [report anonymous abuse]

While many aquarium hobbyists will keep seahorses as pets, seahorses collected from the wild tend to fare poorly in a home aquarium. They will eat only live foods such as brine shrimp and are prone to stress in an aquarium, which lowers the efficiency of their immune systems and makes them susceptible to disease.

In recent years, however, captive breeding of seahorses has become increasingly widespread. These seahorses survive better in captivity, and they are less likely to carry diseases. These seahorses will eat mysid shrimp, and they do not experience the shock and stress of being taken out of the wild and placed in a small aquarium. Although captive-bred seahorses are more expensive, they survive better than wild seahorses, and take no toll on wild populations.

Seahorses should be kept in an aquarium to themselves, or with compatible tank-mates. Seahorses are slow feeders, and in an aquarium with fast, aggressive feeders, the seahorses will be edged out in the competition for food. Special care should be given to ensure that all individuals obtain enough food at feeding times.

Seahorses can co-exist with many species of shrimp and other bottom-feeding creatures. Fish from the goby family also make good tank-mates. Some species are especially dangerous to the slow-moving seahorses and should be avoided completely: eels, tangs, triggerfish, squid, octopus, and sea anemones.

Animals sold as "freshwater seahorses" are usually the closely related pipefish, of which a few species live in the lower reaches of rivers. The supposed true "freshwater seahorse" called Hippocampus aimei was not a real species, but a name sometimes used for individuals of Barbour's seahorse and Hedgehog seahorse. The latter is a species commonly found in brackish waters, but not actually a freshwater fish.

Seahorse populations have been endangered in recent years by overfishing. The seahorse is used in traditional Chinese herbology, and as many as 20 million seahorses may be caught each year and sold for this purpose.^[6] Medicinal seahorses are not readily bred in captivity as they are susceptible to disease and have somewhat different energetics than aquarium seahorses.

Import and export of seahorses has been controlled under CITES since May 15, 2004.

The problem may be exacerbated by the growth of pills and capsules as the preferred method of ingesting medication as they are cheaper and more available than traditional, individually tailored prescriptions of raw medicinals but the contents are harder to track. Seahorses once had to be of a certain size and quality before they were accepted by TCM practitioners and consumers. But declining availability of the preferred large, pale and smooth seahorses has been offset by the shift towards prepackaged medicines, which make it possible for TCM merchants to sell previously unused juvenile, spiny and dark-coloured animals. Today almost a third of the seahorses sold in China are prepackaged. This adds to the pressure on the species.^[7]

A seahorse has highly mobile eyes to watch for predators and prey without moving its body. Like the leafy sea dragon, it also has a long snout with which it sucks up its prey. Its fins are small because it must move through thick water vegetation. The seahorse has a long, prehensile tail which it will curl around any support such as seaweed to prevent being swept away by currents.

edit] Species

• Genus Hippocampus
  • Big-belly seahorse, Hippocampus abdominalis Lesson, 1827 (New Zealand and south and east Australia)
  • Winged seahorse, Hippocampus alatus Kuiter, 2001
  • West African seahorse, Hippocampus algiricus Kaup, 1856
  • Narrow-bellied seahorse, Hippocampus angustus Günther, 1870
  • Barbour's seahorse, Hippocampus barbouri Jordan & Richardson, 1908
  • Pygmy seahorse, Hippocampus bargibanti Whitley, 1970 (West Pacific area (Indonesia, Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, etc)
  • False-eyed seahorse, Hippocampus biocellatus Kuiter, 2001
  • Réunion seahorse, Hippocampus borboniensis Duméril, 1870
  • Short-head seahorse, Hippocampus breviceps Peters, 1869 (south and east Australia)
  • Giraffe seahorse, Hippocampus camelopardalis Bianconi, 1854
  • Knysna seahorse, Hippocampus capensis Boulenger, 1900
  • Hippocampus colemani Kuiter, 2003
  • Tiger tail seahorse, Hippocampus comes Cantor, 1850
  • Hippocampus coronatus Temminck & Schlegel, 1850
  • Denise's pygmy seahorse,  [report anonymous abuse]

A sculpture of a heraldic seahorse that adorned an 18th or 19th century French naval vessel

In heraldry, a seahorse is depicted as a creature with the foreparts of a horse and the hindparts of a fish. See, for example, the right supporter of the Isle of Wight Arms, the supporters on either side of the crest of the city of Newcastle upon Tyne, or the coincidental arms of the University of Newcastle, Australia.

The seahorse is prominent in the logo of Waterford Crystal and the logotype of illustrator W. W. Denslow.

In the Seri culture of northwestern Mexico, the legend is that the seahorse is a person who, to escape his pursuers, fled into the sea, placing his sandals in his waistbelt at his back.^[8]

The National Society for Epilepsy chose a seahorse for its mascot named Cesar (after the Roman emperor, Julius Caesar, who was believed to have had epilepsy). The seahorse mascot was chosen because the hippocampus, a part of the brain that is resistant to damage from epileptic seizures, resembles a seahorse in shape.

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Seahorse, Turneffe Islands, Belize. Image taken by Clark Anderson/Aquaimages.