Animal of the Month

1. There are approximately 35 different types of seahorses, around the world, and two of them are native to the UK.
2. A pregnant male? Seahorses are the only species on Earth in which the male bears the unborn young. The father carries the eggs in his brood pouch until they hatch, releasing the fully formed miniature seahorses into the water.
3. Unlike most fish species, seahorses swim upright using only one back fin while their underwater relatives swim in a horizontal position with the help of a caudal fin. This makes seahorses very poor swimmers, so they can often be found resting with their tails wrapped around corals or sea grasses, similar to how monkey wrap their tails around tree branches.
4. The seahorse was perhaps the inspiration in Greek mythology for Poseidon's horse-drawn ocean chariot. The seahorse's scientific name, Hippocampus, is Greek for "crooked horse".
5. Seahorses like shallow, temperate waters in which they do not need to fight with underwater currents and can attach to stationary objects. They can easily die of exhaustion if they get caught in stormy seas.
6. Seahorses are masters of camouflage and are able to change colour or possibly even grow skin filaments over time to better blend in with their surroundings. They can change from purple to yellow to gray to black in seconds.
7. As many as 25 million seahorses are traded every year for use as pets or dried and sold as gifts, curiosities or Asian traditional medicines (the dried bodies are often ground into a powder for consumption). This helps explain why the species is at risk.,
8. Seahorses have no teeth and no stomach. Food passes through their digestive systems so quickly that they must eat almost constantly to stay alive. They graze continually and can consume 3,000 or more brine shrimp per day.
9. Because of their unique appearance, seahorses are often sold as souvenirs, ornaments and jewelry despite being listed as vulnerable on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's 1996 "red list".
10. Seahorses can move each eye independently, so they do not need to move too much in order to look around.

View the previous animal of the month entries here.