Entry 13 - Even more progress!

It never rains but it pours, this time last week we had one seahorse, as of a few hours ago there are now 8 adults/juveniles and a separate tank with round about 70 four day old fry! Seven of the adults/juveniles are the same species as the one we had last week, Hippocampus histrix, the thorny seahorse, as are the juveniles and one is Hippocampus capensis, the Knysna seahorse. I expected to find H. histrix here but the received wisdom I’d come across says that Knysna seahorse isn’t found anywhere north of South Africa. I’ve been in touch with Neil Garrick-Maidment, the Excutive Director of the Seahorse Trust and he identified it, having raised 30 000 odd of them in the past I’m pretty sure he’s got it right!

Here are pictures of four of them, the other four came in today and yesterday so I’ve not got pictures of them yet.

'Maddie' The first H. histrix we had come in.

'Charlie' The second H. histrix. You can see the brood pouch on the body, it's not all that obvious but if you compare the profile to the female you should be able to work out where it is.

'Seabiscuit' Our third H. histrix, it's a tiny wee one so I don't know the sex yet

'Ezra Flangepipe' (Cheers Mr Spittle) Our first (and only so far) H. capensis.

The fry were born from the second H. histrix male, who was also pregnant when he came in, luckily he survived and is doing really well. They’ve been removed from the main tank, the outflow was too harsh for them, and are now in a separate tank with super low flowthrough and are also doing surprisingly well. I’m not hugely optimistic about keeping many of them alive as we’re pretty unequipped to deal with them, but we’re doing our best with them. Now we’ve got food production going it should be possible to keep a few going for at least a while, but I’m not sure there’s much chance of them proliferating

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The fry setup, they're tiny!

I also managed to take some pretty good video of them, this first video is the male giving birth:

The second video is of the fry tank, just to give a sense of scale they’re about a centimetre long.

This last video is, I reckon, awesome. Seahorses pair for a pretty long time, in some species for life. This pair bond is reinforced through a daily (or more often for our pair) dance together. I was lucky enough to catch our two just as they started this dance, it really is quite beautiful, enjoy!

Tomorrow (if they’ve arrived) we’ll be putting the piping down for the systems in the new building, then the next day the floor will be cast in reinforced concrete, so we’d better get the pipes positioned right!

That’s pretty much it for this week, hope you liked the pictures and video!


EDIT 07/11/11 Four more arrived today, all H. histrix, we've got a proper menagerie now!