Early Sunday morning, as they do every morning, delicate female sea horses at the Shedd Aquarium started their day by seeking out their mates and entwining their tails together. For several minutes, they moved in unison in an astonishingly graceful underwater ballet.
“They promenade together and do merry-go-rounds and maypoles around the seaweed. It’s really quite touching to see,” says Amanda Vincent, who may well be the best friend in the world to the increasingly rare sea horses. “They seem to form permanent, monogamous pairs, and the morning ritual is a sort of daily affirmation of the bond each has for the other.”
Vincent, a professor of populaton biology at Canada’s McGill University, is at the Shedd this weekend for Sunday’s opening of a new special exhibit, “Sea Horse Symphony.”
For the first time in history, the exhibit pulls together under one roof some of the most exotic and difficult-to-maintain creatures alive. It features American, European and Asian sea horses and other, closely related species from all over the world, including pipefishes, shrimpfishes, trumpetfishes, snipefishes and seadragons.
Opening the exhibit on Mother’s Day is a bit of a joke on the Shedd’s part.
The young offspring of the blissful sea horse couples would have a hard time figuring out if Mama or Papa most deserved being honored Sunday. With sea horses, Mama provides the eggs in procreation, but Papa becomes the pregnant stay-
at-home who carries the young until they are born.
“Male sea horses don’t move much from home,” says Vincent. “They wrap their prehensile tails to a piece of grass and generally stay within a territory of about one cubic yard. Females travel about in much larger circles, through a territory of perhaps 10 cubic yards.
“Females are always producing eggs and are always more ready to reproduce than the males, who limit the female reproductive drive. The male seems to demand monogamy as a way of holding his mate close to him.
“He demands her appearance every morning for the ritual dance. It’s like he’s asking her, `Have you got eggs? Have you given eggs to another guy?’ When they do mate, the entire sea horse community seems to do all its mating at the same time, assuring the males that the females will not sneak off to a different mate.”
In the mating season, a pot-bellied male sea horse solicits his mate by opening his abdominal pouch during their ritual dance, showing her it’s empty. She obligingly pours 500 to 600 eggs into it, which he then fertilizes.
The young develop inside the male’s pouch, taking nutrition from the egg membranes that are broken down by enzymes produced by the father. Depending on the species, the fully formed, totally independent sea horses are released from the pouch after two to six weeks. Within a day or so, Mama makes Papa pregnant, again.
It was that ambiguity of gender and sexual roles that caused Vincent in 1985 to do sea horse research for her doctorate. She became the first scientist ever to study them underwater in the wild, though that took some doing.
“I went to Florida in 1986 to do my first underwater research,” she says, “and I couldn’t find the damn things. I mean, I couldn’t spot a single one.”
Among the shared attributes of sea horses and their kin is that they are among nature’s most effective masters of disguise, with shapes and an ability to change colors that allows them to blend seamlessly with their habitat.
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Green alligator pipefish, for example, slender and elongated, are nearly invisible when they attach to shimmering green seagrasses. Leafy seadragons, bristling with leafy, branch-like protrusions sprouting from their backs, almost perfectly blend with the kelp plants they live among.
“I went back to the lab,” says Vincent of her Florida trip, “and it was there I finally developed an eye for spotting them. Now that’s one of my most useful attributes. I’m quite skillful at finding sea horses in nature.”
Her research since has taken Vincent to the far corners of the Earth. It has forced her to develop expertise in subjects far afield from sea horses, including traditional Chinese medicines, international trade conventions, world economics, market diplomacy and Third World rural development.
That is because, just as Vincent began studying them, populations of sea horses around the world began shrinking precipitously.
As China’s economy boomed in the 1980s, millions of Chinese could more readily afford to buy traditional medicines used for thousands of years as treatment for specific medical ailments, ranging from baldness to impotence, and in tonics for general malaise.
Dried, ground sea horse is an ingredient in many of those nostrums. As demand for traditional medicines skyrocketed, sea horse colonies began to suffer from intense overfishing.
Vincent estimates that at least 20 million dried seafish go to Chinese traditional medicine every year. Another million go to the pet trade, though home aquarists usually don’t have the knowledge, equipment and money to buy the living plankton needed to keep sea horses alive for long.
In southeast Asia, the prime sea horse source, populations declined by 70 percent in 10 years. To stop the plunge, Vincent and a colleague, British zoologist Heather Hall, founded Project Sea Horse.
The international project works with fishermen in the Philippines and Vietnam, teaching them how to maintain sea horse populations while continuing to harvest them. It is training and equipping coastal fishing villages for alternative craft and seafood processing industries to make them less reliant on income from sea horses.
“You have to be pragmatic,” says Vincent. “People have to feed their families, and this is their livelihood.”
This year her group is holding a series of international conferences to consult everybody from fishermen to pharmaceutical companies to scientists, hoping to build consensus and an international plan to halt sea horse devastation.
The final meeting will be in December at the Shedd, bringing together specialists from 36 major public aquariums around the world, the first such global meeting ever held devoted to a fish species.
The Shedd has taken on a major role with Project Sea Horse. It has sent scientists to Philippines fishing villages. It also sent its merchandising director to help villagers to develop crafts products suitable for American markets.
The Shedd helped villagers purchase raw materials and equip a small production facility, even paying for an optometrist to make eyeglasses for workers who need them. It has contracted to buy what they make for the Shedd’s stores.
The Shedd, says fish curator Jim Anderson, will use its collection to advance sea horse behavioral, medical and husbandry research.
“Most of these animals scientifically are unknown quantities,” he says, “so this is a great opportunity. There’s a wealth of information we’re learning in the care of these fish.”