Raising Seahorses

[Coradion]

I used to do this all the time at the Waikiki Aquarium, but I recently had a lot of people ask me how to raise seahorses in a less formal setting. So I got some pregnant males and started raising babies again! I figured I'd make an online journal of everything, here's a video of one of my male's giving birth, he's only dropping some extra eggs in this one but the behavior is the same. Right now I have seven babies the size of a couple grains of rice and I love them. Just skip to the last like 30 seconds if you just want to see him giving birth.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQqaGixGs_o

[Mermaid Jaffa]

Ooo!

Do they eat their babies if you forget to feed them?

[MerEmma]

My family raised seahorses for two years when I was younger--it was really neat, but my dad would bring home seaweed in bunches from the lagoon and my mom would sort through it for the food to feed them.

Thanks for sharing! I don't really recall much about the seahorses themselves.

[Mermaid Galene]

Only advanced aquarists are generally successful at keeping and breeding seahorses. I keep seahorses and have raised a second generation, but I don't think I'll raise more babies. Make no mistake, it's a huge amount of work - special tanks with special circulation, live food that must be cultured, etc. I put in 12 hour days for months and months. But for those who are really serious about keeping/breeding these marvelous creatures, there's plenty of information available online about how to do so correctly. Here are the best sites:

www.seahorse.org (http://www.seahorse.org)
www.seahorse.com (http://www.seahorse.com)

Seahorses are intelligent, emotional, and creative animals, so they're well worth the effort required to keep them safe and happy. Mine are professionals; they dance to music, and I incorporate videos of this into our Neptune's Keep and Mermaid Galene performances. This one features my dear departed namesake, Galene, and her husband, Zephyr, as well as their babies:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WALYk2MgpDs

Oh, and, unlike goldfish, who think their own eggs and babies are a fine snack, seahorses completely ignore their young after giving birth.

[Joy&RaptorsUnrestrained!]

I had a seahorse named Nessie when I was a kid, and he or she (it's been so long I can't recall which) was among my favorite pets. Good luck on the rearing, and definitely keep us all posted.

[Coradion]

Ooo!

Do they eat their babies if you forget to feed them?

Nope, they just look at em really funny.

[Coradion]

Only advanced aquarists are generally successful at keeping and breeding seahorses. I keep seahorses and have raised a second generation, but I don't think I'll raise more babies. Make no mistake, it's a huge amount of work - special tanks with special circulation, live food that must be cultured, etc. I put in 12 hour days for months and months. But for those who are really serious about keeping/breeding these marvelous creatures, there's plenty of information available online about how to do so correctly. Here are the best sites:

www.seahorse.org (http://www.seahorse.org)
www.seahorse.com (http://www.seahorse.com)

Seahorses are intelligent, emotional, and creative animals, so they're well worth the effort required to keep them safe and happy. Mine are professionals; they dance to music, and I incorporate videos of this into our Neptune's Keep and Mermaid Galene performances. This one features my dear departed namesake, Galene, and her husband, Zephyr, as well as their babies:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WALYk2MgpDs

Oh, and, unlike goldfish, who think their own eggs and babies are a fine snack, seahorses completely ignore their young after giving birth.



Yeah, I used to raise them at Waikiki Aquarium and I'd usually get a bout fifty babies every brood that would make it to adulthood. It's a bit trickier at home without saltwater lines and a full time culture person but so far I've been able to feed everything with a five gallon bucket and a 2 liter soda bottle worth of live feeds.

[Mermaid Galene]

Good luck with them, Coradion! It is very satisfying when you do bring some through to adulthood. Since I lost Galene so suddenly, I'm really glad to have her children.

[Coradion]

Good luck with them, Coradion! It is very satisfying when you do bring some through to adulthood. Since I lost Galene so suddenly, I'm really glad to have her children.


If I have enough that make it to adulthood would you be interested in one or two? I'm raising H. hilonis a kuda subspecies and I'd love to be able to share a few with other mers who appreciate and understand their care requirements.

[Mermaid Galene]

Thanks, but I've got two very full tanks of seahorses! I don't think the tanks could support more. Someday, though, I want to get a third tank and keep H. adominalis. They are so cool - like little giraffes!

[Coradion]

Which species are you keeping now? I used to keep reidi and those were nice but they were like 4th generation inbreeds from Shedd Aquarium and were definitely "special". I've mostly kept those, kudas, and hilonis. I'm planning on collecting some fisheri in a few weeks. I used to take care of both leafy and weedy seadragons but those are their own kind of nightmare.

What were you feeding yours? I started mine on artemia cultures but have parvo and rotifers as secondary and tertiary feeds. I may even try oithona as a larger size copepod if I can get my monocultures going.

[Mermaid Jaffa]

When I was little, I had the seahorses that you sent away a coupon from a comic book and 50 cents. Those were fun!

[Coradion]

When I was little, I had the seahorses that you sent away a coupon from a comic book and 50 cents. Those were fun!

What!? Where were those when I was a kid!?

[Mermaid Jessica Pearl]

Aaaaaaaw!

[Mermaid Jaffa]

What!? Where were those when I was a kid!?

Depending on the comic, they were either called seahorses or sea monkeys.

They were super! My brother had them too. All you did was add tap water and wait 3 days.

[Mermaid Galene]

@Ireneho: Yeah, I thought you meant sea monkeys. Those are actually brine shrimp, which are one of the zooplankton species that seahorses eat. Seahorses are actually fish. Until recently, seahorses for the aquarium trade were wild caught, and they almost always died. They just couldn't adapt to captivity. Now they're available from captive bred facilities for the home aquarist.

[Mermaid Galene]

Coradion, my ponies are all H. erectus from Ocean Rider seahorse farm on Oahu. They raise exceptionally hardy and beautiful ponies. They have a bunch of other species, as well, and are extremely active in seahorse conservation. When I raised my second generation, I fed them Artemia exclusively until I could wean them to frozen Mysis. I had three Artemia cultures going simultaneously, and I fed the ponies young Artemia less than 24 hours old, so the nutritious yolk sac would be intact for the ponies to consume with the shrimp. After the Artemia were large enough to eat, I fed them Ocean Rider's Vibrance supplement, then fed the enriched Artemia to the seahorse fry. One thing that worked really well for me was training the fry. Fish training is my specialty. I knew I wanted my second generation ponies to pay attention to and enjoy music, so I kept an ipod speaker system by their tank. At feeding time, I played music for them so they would associate music with pleasure. And I wanted them to develop a sense of rhythm and musical form. Their feeding cue was, and still is, ragtime music by Scott Joplin. That has a very distinct rhythmic structure. At other times during the day, I play other forms of music, but for feeding it's always ragtime. This protocol was extremely useful when I got to the point of trying to wean my seahorse fry from live food to frozen. I used frozen Cyclop-eeze for the first frozen food. The very first time I offered it, I mixed it with some live Artemia, and I played ragtime as the feeding cue. Because the ponies were conditioned to feed when they heard ragtime, they accepted the Cyclop-eeze almost immediately, and within 3 days they were completely weaned onto frozen food.

The next step in their musical training will be to consistently play music for them while I dance in front of their tank. I've done it a few times, but I've gotten so busy with Neptune's Keep that I just haven't had the time to do much fish training. Now that my champion dancer, Galene, is gone, I really want to work with her children to see if any of them have music in their little souls. Hopefully I'll have more time once my mermaid business starts swimming along!

It must have been really cool working with seadragons. They're pretty much beyond the scope of home aquarists, I think, but I love them -- especially the weedies; they look like something directly out of Dr. Seuss!

[PearlieMae]

What!? Where were those when I was a kid!?

Oh, the disappointment to find they were just brine shrimp... http://digitaldigging.net/dances-with-sea-monkeys-the-highly-unlikely-life-and-times-of-harold-von-braunhut/

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[Mermaid Jaffa]

I was very young at the time... I was also very sad the sea monkeys did not look like in the comic book!

I think we got bored with ours and fed them to our fish.

[Coradion]

Oh, the disappointment to find they were just brine shrimp... http://digitaldigging.net/dances-with-sea-monkeys-the-highly-unlikely-life-and-times-of-harold-von-braunhut/

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That's what I feed my baby seahorses :P no joke.

[Coradion]

Coradion, my ponies are all H. erectus from Ocean Rider seahorse farm on Oahu. They raise exceptionally hardy and beautiful ponies. They have a bunch of other species, as well, and are extremely active in seahorse conservation. When I raised my second generation, I fed them Artemia exclusively until I could wean them to frozen Mysis. I had three Artemia cultures going simultaneously, and I fed the ponies young Artemia less than 24 hours old, so the nutritious yolk sac would be intact for the ponies to consume with the shrimp. After the Artemia were large enough to eat, I fed them Ocean Rider's Vibrance supplement, then fed the enriched Artemia to the seahorse fry. One thing that worked really well for me was training the fry. Fish training is my specialty. I knew I wanted my second generation ponies to pay attention to and enjoy music, so I kept an ipod speaker system by their tank. At feeding time, I played music for them so they would associate music with pleasure. And I wanted them to develop a sense of rhythm and musical form. Their feeding cue was, and still is, ragtime music by Scott Joplin. That has a very distinct rhythmic structure. At other times during the day, I play other forms of music, but for feeding it's always ragtime. This protocol was extremely useful when I got to the point of trying to wean my seahorse fry from live food to frozen. I used frozen Cyclop-eeze for the first frozen food. The very first time I offered it, I mixed it with some live Artemia, and I played ragtime as the feeding cue. Because the ponies were conditioned to feed when they heard ragtime, they accepted the Cyclop-eeze almost immediately, and within 3 days they were completely weaned onto frozen food.

The next step in their musical training will be to consistently play music for them while I dance in front of their tank. I've done it a few times, but I've gotten so busy with Neptune's Keep that I just haven't had the time to do much fish training. Now that my champion dancer, Galene, is gone, I really want to work with her children to see if any of them have music in their little souls. Hopefully I'll have more time once my mermaid business starts swimming along!

It must have been really cool working with seadragons. They're pretty much beyond the scope of home aquarists, I think, but I love them -- especially the weedies; they look like something directly out of Dr. Seuss!


Ocean Rider is on Big Island, I've dealt with them before and it was pleasant but not the best experience I've had. There are weird rules about seahorses on the islands and Ocean Rider doesn't always have to abide by the same standards others are held to which can be a bit irritating (just a personal irritation nothing serious). Like they get to keep and sell species that aren't legal for some establishments to keep and they do captive rearing, but no formal research and some research institutes aren't allowed to work on those species. I've used their vibrance foods before and wasn't a big fan of them for feeding my reidi's. I guess I'm spoiled out here and work at Hawai'i Institute of Marine Biology doing culture work so I can always experiment with new cultures and have access to copepod and rotifer cultures all the time. I'm probably not going to train my horses to eat frozen, I've thought about it and the nutritional tradeoff is kinda blech even though it's sooo much easier to keep them on frozen food. I think I'm just gonna torture myself with catching live food for them when they're older.

I've trained fishes before, like my spotted knifejaw does tricks and I've had some really personable fishes but I'm not a big fan of using auditory cues. Especially with larval fishes I'm always worried about messing up their otoliths and I've seen some weird preliminary research papers on damage caused by lab noises and vibrations to some animals. I may train them with gavage feeding or eventually with a shape board.

[Mermaid Galene]

I do agree Ocean Rider has their problems. They messed up several of my orders and were really snippy about it. Carol and I are not on the best of terms! But I do admire their conservation work and the vigor of their ponies. And I love their tech guy, Pete Giwojna.

With some of the goldfish I've trained, I found an iPad works great for visual shape cues.

[Coradion]

If only I had such technology! I use a cutting board with a shape painted on it :P Carol is kinda weird with other people who rear seahorses. Like I've worked with seadragons before and she wouldn't even let us see her's for fear we'd still an idea. It's like... if you really care about the conservation of the species which is now barred from leaving Australia you'd want to collaborate as much as possible cause neither our aquarium or her facility are successful at raising them but together we might be able to fill in missing pieces, but nope. She seems very into the profit she's making on 'em which is fine and she does do good work, but she doesn't even rear native Hawai'ian seahorses anymore which seems silly.

[Mermaid Galene]

Yes, Carol is very... grumpy. One of the reasons I decided to learn how to raise my own seahorses is that I never want to be without them, but I don't want to have to deal with Ocean Rider again! They're great with their animals, but they absolutely suck at customer service.

[Coradion]

It's so nice to meet someone else who feels the same way! I'm stoked I might get to help rear some pygmy seahorses soon! Also Ocean Rider's prices are like... absolutely ridiculous.

[Mermaid Galene]

Got that right! They are obnoxiously expensive. Ooh, pygmies. Cool!

[Coradion]

The biggest issue with keeping those little guys seems to be keeping the host gorgonian alive.

[Mermaid Galene]

Pygmies are such fascinating seahorses, especially since they were so recently discovered. And their camouflage coloration is amazing, not to mention, pretty. I may have to make some silicone Pygmies for one of my mermaid costumes! Someday I hope I get a chance to see Pygmy seahorses.

[Coradion]

I love them, they're sooo tiny though. I'm always paranoid I'll siphon them up or something. My Seahorse books have some of the really rare species in them and I wish I could just travel the world collecting pairs. I love sea ponies way too much... I'm glad you understand the obsession Galene. Most people don't get it

[Mermaid Galene]

Yep. :highfive:

[Coradion]

Do you have development pictures of your babies? I don't know when my hilonis should be able to attach to a piece of substrate. Kinda wishing they were one of the species that can do it from the get go.

[Mermaid Galene]

H. erectus have a relatively short pelagic phase, but like all pelagic seahorse fry, they can gulp too much air at the surface. So I kept them in a kreisel setup:

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I had two kreisel tanks made from fishbowls in a larger, 30 gallon tank, because two of my adult pairs had babies around the same time, and I raised some fry from both broods. I found that my fry weren't strong enough to hitch and then swim independently until they were about two weeks old. Before that time, they could hitch, but they would go after artemia on the bottom of the fishbowl and get stranded without the circular water current. So I kept the kreisel circulation going strong for two weeks. I then kept the kreisel circulation going at a reduced intensity for a few more days. At three weeks of age, I took the fishbowls out and moved each brood of fry into a 5 gallon "corral" within the 30 gallon tank. These were just acrylic shoeboxes with their tops at the surface of the larger tank, so the fry couldn't leave the corral. At this point, they were hitching quite well:

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There they could swim independently without having to deal with the challenges of navigating the current/ volume of the larger 30 gallon tank. They lived in their corrals until they were 4.5 months old:

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The next step was to let them have access to the entire 30 gallon tank, except I kept their favorite hitching posts in smaller containers to give them a calm place to hitch if they wanted to avoid current:

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I also decided to let the two herds of fry intermingle at this point. They lived in this setup until they were 7 months old, at which point they were big enough to inhabit their adult tank, where they still live.

This step by step protocol was for H. erectus, of course. From what I've read, species like H. hilonis with a more prolonged pelagic phase require kreisel circulation for 5-6 weeks. I guess I'm not sure at what point they would be able to hitch. My fry could hitch after 2-3 days, but they still needed the circular circulation for 2.5 weeks to keep them from gulping too much air at the surface or getting stranded on the bottom. Some of this was trial and error. I lost some fry at each stage of the game, starting with 75 and ultimately ending up with 8 brought to adulthood.

It's kind of fun, two years later, to look back on the development of Solace, Joplin, Bethena, Leola, Eugenia, Cleopha, Zenyatta, and Mona Louise!

[Mermaid Wesley]

This makes me want baby seahorses oh my goodness! I think I should just take care of Gill the betta though ;) I'm not the most fish savvy gal.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Coradion]

I have kreisel like flow right now in my 16 gallon tank. I used to have these awesome pseudo-kreisels for jellies and baby ponies when I was at the aquarium. They had a screened off section so you could filter the tank directly without slurping up every baby.

Mine aren't having issues gulping air, I think my flow is high enough that they get pulled down from the surface before they can really get into any trouble. I'm just not sure what I'll do with like 200+ horses if they all make it -.- I have some good enrichment foods and cultures that most people don't usually have access too so I'm hoping feeding that as well as some wild caught plankton will really cut down the pelagic phase. 50% water changes everyday make me nuts especially when I can't siphon normally without them getting sucked up.

[Mermaid Galene]

Yeah, cleaning is nerve wracking when they're so small. I'd be amazed if your herd didn't thin themselves out as time goes on. I lost some to my mistakes, some to Uronema, and some to just plain old natural selection. Ultimately I ended up with a sustainable number. Though I hadn't originally planned to keep more than two, in the end I just couldn't part with any of them!

[Coradion]

I might release half of them just to make things easier, but I'm kind of afraid to. I love them all! I tried siphoning today with a really wide soda bottle on the intake end covered in mesh. It worked pretty well as long as I start/stop the flow so ponies unstick as soon as they get pulled against it. I've had really high success rates with horses before so I'm optimistic but I expect to lose about half of em. Most likely to a stupid accident or something. This is what I woke up to on day 5 of rearing. Day 4 I had like 12-15 babies.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAB2cNggH3A&feature=youtu.be

[Mermaid Galene]

Lol! The look on your face is priceless!

[Coradion]

I was happy but really not happy at the same time. I didn't have enough cultured food for that day.

[Mermaid Galene]

It's amazing how much those tiny little critters eat! I had three Artemia cultures going simultaneously, plus I supplemented with copepods from a little algae-ridden Sexy Shrimp tank I had nearby, and there were still days when it was touch and go getting enough food. And the Uronema I had to battle at one point came from the decapsulated brine shrimp eggs, in spite of my rinsing eggs and Artemia in hydrogen peroxide and fresh water for every meal. I was literally putting in 12-hour work days trying to keep up with all of it. A fact I frequently remind myself of whenever I consider doing it again!

[Mermaid Jaffa]

Curious. What do you do with all the grown up seahorses? Do you sell them to pet shops, aquariums, other sea horse lovers, or keep and breed them until every tank is crowded?

[Mermaid Galene]

In my case, I only did this once, and I kept all the babies. I installed them in a new tank, so I now have two seahorse tanks - one for each generation.