Fascinating creatures are common in back bays. Habitat needs our protection
By Bill Barlow
As Sue Forrest hauled a crab trap onto the dock of the Bayside Center in Ocean City, she noticed something surprising. Some of the seaweed that came along with the trap was flopping. Looking closer, she found two tiny seahorses.
“Their little tails were wrapped around part of the crab trap,” she said. “I had two of them. I figured they were a mated pair.”
That’s right; seahorses are monogamous.
Forrest is a retired art teacher who works summers at The Bayside Center, an environmental and educational center at 520 Bay Ave. operated by Ocean City. The site was long known as the Wheaton Estate, with a house dating from 1916.
Forrest took her tiny captives and put them in one of the display tanks at the center, choosing carefully to be certain they would not be eaten by one of the other occupants. They fed them shrimp pellets and kept them for a little while before releasing the pair in the bay. They were in the aquarium long enough for Forrest to see their undersea mating dance.
“They twirled and danced and whirled,” she said, while one – she believed it was the male, changed color.
That’s right; seahorses change color, another of multiple unusual aspects of the tiny fish that hardly look like fish at all. For instance, the males carry their young in a pouch, taking them in as eggs and releasing them as fully formed minuscule seahorses. They are one of the few animals that can move each eye independently of the other. Chameleons are another.
Linda Taylor recently found one on a beach walk in Avalon, where she has a second home. An avid snorkeler, she said she has often seen them in the clear waters of the Caribbean but had not seen any in New Jersey before. She was happy the little guy was still alive, and after taking a photo on the beach returned it to the water.
She posted her image to the Facebook page All Things Avalon, where hundreds of people reacted. Many said they’d never seen one, while one commenter said she would see them by the dock when her parents lived on the bay in the 1970s.
“Oh, what a treasure,” she wrote. Many others said they love seahorses.
“It was definitely alive,” Taylor said. She hopes it survived getting beached.
Dr. Elizabeth Lacey was not surprised someone found a seahorse in southern New Jersey, but was surprised to hear that one washed up on the beach alive. They do not do very well with waves, she said, preferring the quiet waters of the bay. Although they are a kind of fish, they are not able to swim against a strong current, depending instead on their prehensile tails to cling to grass, coral or other stationary objects.
“They’re actually really awkward swimmers. They have such a tiny dorsal fin,” she said.
Known to her students as Dr. Z, Lacey is an associate professor of marine science at Stockton University. She’s a specialist in marine botany and has often found seahorses in the beds of eel grass in bays throughout the area.
“I’ve always loved seahorses since I was a little kid,” Lacey said. She and her students find them when exploring seagrass beds or running a sein net through the bay water. “If you hold one in your hand, they will wrap their tail around your finger, which is kind of like the most adorable thing ever.”
She said the species has a special appeal for many people, including many children.
“They’re personable looking. They’re charismatic in some way. There’s a unique appeal across all ages,” she said. “You’re talking to a marine biologist, so everything in the ocean is appealing to me.”
In New Jersey, the most common species are the lined seahorse and the northern seahorse, she said. With the tail, they are usually about four or five inches long. They are closely related to the pipe fish, which Lacey said looks just like you would expect – a long, thin fish with a head that looks just like that of a seahorse.
“It’s the straight version instead of a curled-up version,” she said.
The scientific name for the seahorse genus is hippocampus, from the ancient Greek for “Horse” and “Sea Monster.” If that name sounds familiar it may be because it is shared by a section of the human brain that plays a role in memory, named by a 16th century anatomist who thought it resembled a seahorse.
The fish – not the section of the brain – have bony plates and protective spikes. They are one of only two kinds of fish that swim vertically. Their very simple digestive system means they need to feed constantly, sucking almost microscopic crustaceans into their tiny mouths.
Little is known about the size of seahorse populations worldwide. As with many species, human beings seem to be the greatest threat to seahorses, which are collected to be dried and sold both as souvenirs and for use in folk medicine.
A 2018 report posed at oceana.org states that worldwide seahorses are in trouble both from the global trade and from the loss of habitat. Fisheries.org reported the small number of accidental catches of various kinds of seahorses around the world in commercial fishing operations adds up to about 37 million individuals a year.
“The bigger threat is that we’re losing the habitat they need,” Lacey said.
Locally, the best way to help seahorses is to protect the sea grass habitat on which they depend, she said. Over the past decade, she has monitored sea grass areas in New Jersey. Some areas are seeing a decline, with an increase in other areas.
Born by the hundreds and released from their father’s pouch, baby seahorses rely on beds of seagrass for protection. So do the adults, and multiple other species that people either find adorable or tasty, like scallops and flounder.
“We need really healthy seagrass beds to form that refuge,” Lacey said. “If you protect the habitat, you give protection to a lot of different critters.”
