What kind of an animal do you think this is? How would you classify it? Is it a reptile? Is it a fish? Is it a horse? Is it a monster? Is it a dragon?  For a long time scientists were not sure and its scientific name, hippocampus, means ‘horse-like sea monster’. It is in fact a very special kind of fish; a seahorse.

Seahorses live in warm seas and coral reefs and they swim upright. They are creatures with some very unusual features. Their tails are prehensile, which means that they can be used to hold on firmly. So they can cling on tightly to a branch of coral, which protects them from currents and rough seas. They make one part of the sea their home and return to the same part of the coral which is called their ‘holdfast’. They curl up their tails to drop down to the bottom of the ocean where they are safer. Seahorses do not have teeth. Their food is plankton which they suck in through the snout. They can change colour to camouflage themselves with their surroundings as a protection.

What is most special about the seahorse is that it is the male that gets pregnant. The male fish has a pouch like a kangaroo. In the breeding season, the female fish produces the eggs that she lays in the male’s pouch after they have twined their tails together. The pouch is then sealed and the male looks after the growing eggs until they are miniature versions of their parents with a head and tail.  He then pushes the babies out of the pouch, sometimes as many as two or three hundred babies at a time. They float away and live on their own until they are fully grown and ready to mate. Seahorses mate for life.

There are many different species of seahorse and they are all endangered. Some get eaten by other fish especially when young and tiny, others get trapped in the fishing nets used for tuna and other large fish. They are also caught for the tourist trade, and are disturbed by humans exploring coral reefs.