Naturalist Georgina Jones takes us on a fascinating journey into the secret life of seahorses. We discover an unconventional sea family indeed.
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F ASKED TO DRAW a fish, most people would come up with a sleek, streamlined shape with a pointed nose and a split tail. Not an animal that could have been made up of a menagerie of other animals, which is what seahorses resemble. Seahorses have heads like horses – if horses wore crowns. Their eyes, like those of a chameleon, focus independently. Their laughably miniature fins are more like insect wings than anything else. They lack scales, having skin stretched over a boxlike armour plating, their bellies are cartoonishly round, and their tails 38 |
SEA RESCUE AUTUMN 2020
are snaky and prehensile. Seahorses are clearly not evolved for high-speed chases. But they are most certainly fish, even though many evolutionary steps were probably involved in their digression from the standard fish shape and lifestyle. Seahorses, pygmy seahorses, pipefishes and ghost pipefishes are members of an unusual fish family, the Syngnathidae. Pipefishes look like straight, skinny seahorses. Ghost pipefishes are well camouflaged to resemble seaweed or the sea fans they prefer, whereas pygmy seahorses are so tiny and so well
camouflaged that their existence was only discovered through a chance collection of the sea fans on which they live. They use their snouts to hoover up small crustaceans: by creating a vacuum along the length of their snouts, they pull small animals towards their waiting mouths. Some of the larger pipefishes also prey on other small fishes. The seahorse family has developed into becoming less fleet of fin and more stealthy. Their silly-looking fins are adapted for precision hovering. They also rely on camouflage for ambush hunting and
PHOTOGRAPHS: GEORGINA JONES
COLOURFUL little characters
