When the Shedd Aquarium opened its temporary Sea Horse Symphony exhibit in 1998, it was supposed to last just 18 months displaying the odd and charming creatures.
The exhibit will finally close Jan. 4 after an extraordinarily successful 5 1/2-year run that made important history for the Shedd and for the survival of all ocean fish.
The Shedd put together a then-unprecedented collection of 25 species of sea horses and their close cousins, pipe fish, trumpet fish and sea dragons. In doing so, it ignored the advice of marine experts who warned it would be impossible to keep sea horses alive in an aquarium setting for more than a couple of months.
Sea Horse Symphony quickly became an all-time favorite exhibit, temporary or permanent, at the Shedd.
Part of the appeal rests with how weird the animals look. Slow, delicate swimmers, their only defense is to blend in with the landscapes in which they live. Some use their ability to change colors almost instantly. Others have evolved into fantastic shapes, like the leafy sea dragon, which, shaped like a kelp shrub, resembles no other fish in the world.
Part of the appeal probably rests with the charming, romantic nature of sea horse courtship and the flip-flop of sexual roles–males become pregnant.
At least 5 million people have visited the exhibit, which still displays many of its original animals. Though it will close so the space it occupies can be used for future temporary exhibits, the Shedd will continue to display nine of the species, some in a mini version of the exhibit in its regular fish galleries, some in its new Wild Reef addition.
Exhibit defied experts
Before Sea Horse Symphony, so little was known about how to keep sea horse species alive, most experts whom the Shedd consulted thought the exhibit would be forced to close in a matter of three or four months as the animals died.
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“Their diseases were unknown, so we had no idea what medical problems we would see or what medications and treatment procedures we could use as they came in,” said Jeff Mitchell, a senior aquarist at the Shedd who oversees the exhibit.
Most of the animals the Shedd brought in to start the exhibit were bought from collectors who brought them from the wild. Many had not been seen before in public aquariums.
“Our biggest problem was food,” Mitchell said. “We didn’t know what to feed them, or how and when to feed them.”
The experts they consulted all said sea horses would survive only on live brine shrimp, he said, but he and his colleagues were unhappy with that choice because bringing in live food also brings in a host of diseases and parasites.
Early on, the Shedd decided to experiment with getting the animals converted to eating frozen brine shrimp, which is cleansed of most disease and parasites and can be fortified with vitamins and minerals. Now 98 percent of them eat frozen food.
“A lot of the animals when they first came here were skinny and pale,” Mitchell said. “Once they started eating our food, they became much more robust, and we began seeing breeding activity with species that had never displayed such activity before in aquarium settings.”
Indeed, Mitchell and his staff pioneered much of the sea horse reproductive-research protocol now used by other institutions.
It is the romance that sea horses seem to invest in their reproductive behavior that attracts many humans to sea horse exhibits.
The animals pair off in monogamous, male-female bonds, but with sea horses, it is the males that get pregnant and stay at home, while the females spend much of their time swimming far from the stalk of sea grass each pair stakes out as home.
At daybreak each morning, the female returns to her mate, who usually tethers himself to their grass stalk with his prehensile tail. When the female appears, she and the male entwine their tails and do a ritual promenade, a sort of maypole dance around the grass stalk.
During the dance, the male opens his abdominal pouch and invites his mate to look inside. If she sees eggs she previously deposited in the pouch still there, she ignores him. If the pouch is empty, she refills it with new eggs, which the male fertilizes.
Thus the males remain “pregnant” more or less constantly. They carry hundreds of eggs in their bloated bellies until they hatch as perfectly formed, totally self-sustaining baby sea horses that swim off, allowing mama to impregnate papa again the next morning.
Fish sent worldwide
At the Shedd, Mitchell has done considerable research on kuda, a species also known as the oceanic sea horse, starting by observing that kuda females refill the pouches of their mates every two weeks, like clockwork.
Every two weeks he carefully counts the 1,000 to 1,400 tiny hatchlings as they emerge from the male. In the first hatches, none survived more than five days, but Mitchell discovered that the young sea horses require a complete change of food sources every few days. Without the change, they die.
“We had to develop an entire protocol of what foods to serve them and when,” he said of the emerging babies. “I can’t tell you how exciting it was to keep them alive, first for six days, then 15 days and so on, until we got them to adulthood and saw them breed.”
Now the Shedd sends out new generations of the fish to be kept in other aquariums around the world. Other aquariums, using the Shedd’s methods, have learned how to breed species the Shedd has not worked with, creating a cooperative in which expertise and babies are traded.
Shedd keepers, vets and lab technicians ended up identifying so many previously undocumented sea horse diseases and improvised so many medical treatments that their published findings now are the standard sea horse husbandry manual used everywhere in the world.
As the Shedd first began planning Sea Horse Symphony, it sought advice from the world’s reigning sea horse authority, Amanda Vincent, now a University of British Columbia professor and founder of Project Sea Horse, an acclaimed international ocean conservation campaign.
Vincent, one of the experts who at first doubted the exhibit’s success, soon not only began advising the aquarium, she and the Shedd also began collaborating on her campaign to slow international trade in sea horses.
As China’s economy boomed in the 1980s, millions of Chinese for the first time had money to buy traditional medicines used as treatment for specific medical ailments, ranging from baldness to impotence.
Dried, ground sea horse is an ingredient in many of those nostrums. As demand for traditional medicines skyrocketed, the prime sea horse source, southeast Asia, saw sea horse colony populations decline by 70 percent in 10 years.
“Sea Horse Symphony helped to change conservation activity around the world,” said Vincent, citing the awareness it created and research it has done and inspired elsewhere.
UN adopted trade rules
The Shedd also worked with Project Sea Horse in drafting an international wild sea horse population management and protection plan that the UN adopted in 2000, the first such trade restrictions it ever passed for ocean fish of any kind.
“People ignore the plight of oceans,” Vincent said, “so we have seen precipitous declines of fishes and other animals, but now we have a powerful international agreement on behalf of sea horses. It confirms the growing public perception that fish are wildlife too.”
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Underscoring the impact of Sea Horse Symphony, it won the two highest honors given by the American Zoo and Aquarium Association, the Exhibit of the Year Award in 1999, and its award for significant achievement in conservation in 2002.