Wow, I can only imagine how exciting it must have been growing up in Florida with native H. erectus and H. zosterae right at your very doorstep!
I also remember the bad old days when wild-caught seahorses were the only option and trying to cater to their needs and keep them well-fed was a full-time job and a losing proposition. This is how I described that daunting task in a recent magazine article:
<Open quote> Unfortunately, the dietary requirements of wild-caught seahorses are very difficult to meet. Consequently, maintaining them in captivity--let alone breeding and rearing them--is a daunting challenge best reserved for public institutions and the most experienced, advanced hobbyists.
Proper nutrition is the primary problem. In their natural habitat, seahorses feed more or less continuously throughout the daylight hours, consuming great numbers of small crustaceans and other larval organisms that are collectively termed zooplankton. Thus, in the wild, they are free to select prey items from a lipid-rich planktonic soup consisting of countless copepods, mysids, amphipods, ostracods, isopods, shrimps and the larval stages of myriad larger crustaceans. Attempting to duplicate the quality and quantity of the seahorse's natural diet is a tremendous challenge for the aquarist.
Furnishing wild-caught seahorses with a healthy, balanced diet is thus a painstaking, time-consuming process. It requires collecting live foods in the field, maintaining live food cultures at home, patiently training them to eat nonliving prey and frozen foods, and even conditioning them to accept handfeeding at times. For those fortunate enough to have access to the seashore, field collecting means enduring endless hours of slogging through saltmarshes in search of mosquito larvae and wading knee-deep across tidal flats at low tide to reach tidal pools that might contain amphipods or small shrimps. It means hand-seining seagrass beds for grass shrimps, towing plankton nets, and diving after shoals of live mysids. And it involves long afternoons at the beach toiling tirelessly under the hot sun, shaking malodorous mats of Sargassum and countless clumps of clammy seaweed over your collecting bucket in search of scuds and beach-hoppers. For the inland hobbyist, it means spending your spare time straining stagnant pools for freshwater Gammarus and Daphnia. After a live-food collecting expedition, insect bites, sunburn, and stinging cuts and abrasions on hands and knees are badges of courage proudly displayed by dedicated seahorse keepers everywhere.
Once back home from a collecting trip, it's time to look after your catch and tend to your live food cultures. For starters, there is the obligatory large grow out tank for brine shrimp as well as separate tanks for raising amphipods and various types of live shrimp (ghost shrimp, grass shrimp, mysids, caprellids). Serious seahorse fanciers have even been known to employ wading pools and outdoor goldfish ponds (minus the goldfish) as their Artemia grow-out tanks. At least one good-sized aquarium is normally devoted to a harem of live-bearing tropicals, usually guppies or--even better--mollies adapted to full-strength saltwater, so the newborn fry they produce so prolifically can be fed to your hungry seahorses. Breeding a single pair of wild-caught seahorses might easily require a half dozen live-food culture tanks plus several refugia, a whole battery of Artemia hatcheries, rows of "greenwater" infusoria bottles, and banks of rotifer cultures in addition to all the live food that can be collected. In short, with its forest of gleaming glassware and glittering apparatus filled with hissing valves, bubbling flasks, and stewing vats filled with mysterious organisms, the fish room of a dedicated seahorse keeper used to resemble nothing so much as an overworked mad scientist's diabolical laboratory. <End quote>
Thank goodness the advent of domesticated seahorses that are born and bred for aquarium life and accustomed to eating frozen Mysis as their staple, everyday diet has changed all that! The latest generation of captive-bred-and-raised Hippocampus erectus are a whole new breed of seahorses that are no more difficult to keep and feed than your average angelfish. Now we are all free to enjoy them from the comfort of our own den or living room.
Best of luck with your new seahorses, sir! It's great to hear how much you are enjoying your Ocean Riders!
Happy Trails! Pete Giwojna
| | The administrator has disabled public write access.
My name is Christine and I am from Naples Florida.
My hubby and I converted from a fresh water tank over to a saltwater tank about a year ago. We appsolutely love it...
I thought it was time to add my long awaited for seahorses a few weeks back. unfortunetly we went to a LFS and had a totally bad experience. I was totally heartbroken when my horses died. I love and ride real horses and these marvelous sea creatures are like minature horses in our tank. They seem much more aware of their surroundings and more intelligent than the other fish that we have.
I was so looking forward to them feeling at home and becoming less shy.
I'm really glad I found this site and can't wait to order my first horses from here.
Pete, after reading everything that you suggested, I do have few more questions that I posted under my original post. If someone has time Iwould appreciate the input.
Christine
| | The administrator has disabled public write access.
I'm sorry to hear about your unfortunate experience with the wild seahorses from your LFS, but I would be happy to help you avoid such problems in the future, and I can assure you that you can can look forward to much greater success with the hardy, easy-to-feed domesticated seahorses from Ocean Rider
Delicate wild-caught seahorses are unfortunately very challenging to keep and raise. Stress and malnutrition weaken their immune systems and leave them vulnerable to all sorts of disease problems. And then there is the problem of feeding them due to their dependency on live foods, which further complicates everything.. Hardy captive bred seahorses that are trained to eat frozen foods, on the other hand, are very much at home in the aquarium and are relatively easy to care for. More home hobbyists are able to breed and raise cultured seahorses such as Mustangs successfully than any other type of marine fishes.
Farm-praised seahorses have been born and bred for aquarium life for generation after generation. They are at home in the aquarium, accustomed to eating readily provided frozen foods as their staple diet, and used to living in close proximity to others of their kind. Wild-caught seahorses, on the other hand, are starting out with the deck stacked against them and find captive conditions very unnatural and highly stressful. They have been abruptly snatched from their natural environment, wrenched apart from their mates, starved while they make the rounds from collector to wholesaler to retailer to hobbyist, and exposed to all manner of pathogens and parasites at every stop along the way. They are accustomed to eating live foods and, with the patchy distribution typical of all Hippocampines, they rarely encounter seahorses other than their mates in the vastness of the sea. As a result, wild-caught seahorses typically have considerable difficulty adjusting to aquarium conditions, unnatural foods, and living in constant contact with other seahorses.
Consequently, when we eager hobbyists got our hands on the first farm-raised seahorses it quickly became evident that they were superior to their wild conspecifics as aquarium specimens in every respect. Vastly superior! In every way. In terms of their hardiness, ease of maintenance, disease resistance, longevity, adaptability, suitability for the captive environment, willingness to breed in the aquarium, genetic diversity, vigor, friendliness and sociability, coloration, and especially their feeding habits, they put wild seahorses to shame. No contest. Generations of selective breeding have transformed cultured seahorses into far different animals -- a whole new breed -- than wild seahorses. Compared to their wild-caught cousins, the captive-bred-and-raised seahorses are far more fun, much easier to keep and more convenient to care for, and generally more attractive specimens as well.
In short, the advantages of farm-raised, captive-bred seahorses over wild-caught specimens are many, obvious, and compelling. For starters, let's examine their different feeding habits. Before captive-bred specimens were available, one of the seahorse keeper's greatest challenges was providing wild-caught seahorses with a balanced, nutritious diet, stemming from their reliance on hard-to-provide live foods. Meeting their long-term needs was a difficult, expensive proposition. It required numerous live food cultures, rigorous field trips to collect live foods, and special training sessions to try to teach them to eat frozen foods, which often proved to be a prolonged, highly frustrating exercise in futility.
By comparison, feeding farm-raised seahorses is simplicity itself. Raised in captivity, all captive-bred seahorses are pre-trained to eat frozen Mysis shrimp as their staple diet. Frozen Mysis relicta have an extremely high protein content, and when fortified with special enrichment products rich in highly unsaturated fatty acids, carotenoids, Vitamins C and A and essential minerals, it provides a highly nutritious diet that contains all of the crucial components necessary for the long-term health of the seahorse. In my opinion, the best of these enrichment products is a dry powder formulation (i.e., Vibrance) especially developed in Hawaii to provide a balanced diet for seahorses when used in conjunction with the protein-rich frozen Mysis. A nutritious diet of enriched, frozen Mysis relicta thus ensures long-term survivability, high health, high mating frequency and beautiful, vibrant colors in our pampered pets.
In fact, this is such a superb diet that it is strongly suggested that the aquarist "fast" his seahorses one day per week, and feeding live foods is totally unnecessary except as a monthly treat. Contrast a trip to your refrigerator twice a day to thaw frozen Mysis, and no feeding at all once a week, with the collecting expeditions, live food cultures, and painstaking training procedures required to sustain wild-caught seahorses and wean them onto frozen fodder, and you can see there is really no comparison (Giwojna, May 2002).
Breeding is another area where wild seahorses simply cannot compete with their captive-bred counterparts. In the olden days, greater seahorses removed from the wild rarely bred in captivity. There were a number of reasons for this ranging from traumatic capture techniques and mishandling by dealers to difficulty adjusting to a captive environment to the sort of feeding problems we've been discussing above. But one big factor was that in the aquarium they lacked the type of seasonal or cyclical environmental cues (falling water temperature, changes in day length, reduced salinity from monsoon rains, moon phases and high tides, etc.) they normally experience in the wild that regulate the breeding season. These environmental stimuli trigger the secretion of gonadotropin and other key hormones that prepare them for breeding and govern their reproductive activity. Without these environmental cues and the hormonally induced changes they trigger, many times they simply ceased to breed in captivity. Researchers dealt with such setbacks through wild procurement of gravid males. In other words, loaded or pregnant males removed from the wild provided the fry needed for rearing projects and laboratory study in those days.
Captive-bred seahorses normally experience no such difficulties in the boudoir. They are highly domesticated and very well adapted to the aquarium environment. They are not subject to the traumatic capture methods or mishandling and abuse en route to the hobbyist. Born and bred for captivity generation after generation, for them the aquarium is their natural habitat. As a result, for the most part, they have lost their dependence on seasonal cues and external stimuli when it comes to mating. Rather than external environmental cues, for farm-raised seahorses, which have been raised at far greater population densities than seahorses ever experience in the wild, it is the presence of other seahorses -- potential mates -- that appears to get their hormones flowing and triggers courtship. (Pheromones or sex hormones almost certainly play a role in this.) In other words, living amidst a group of potential partners at all times seems to be what turns on captive-bred seahorses, and breeding appears to be their number one mission in life. Compared to their wild conspecifics, farm-raised seahorses seem to court constantly, breed like bunnies, and change partners often.
But to me, the most striking difference between cultured seahorses and wild specimens has always been the increased hardiness of the former. Captive-bred seahorses simply enjoy a huge advantage over their wild-caught brethren in terms of their health, disease resistance, and conditioning, and that naturally translates to greater longevity in the aquarium. To understand why they are so much hardier and healthier, we must examine how cultured seahorses and seahorses captured from the wild are handled before they reach the hobbyist. It is largely a matter of stress. In a nutshell, captive-bred-and-raised seahorses are not stressed by aquarium life and are not abused en route to the aquarist, and that makes all the difference in the world in terms of their fitness and lifespan in captivity.
When you place an order for farm-raised seahorses, they are then delivered overnight directly to your door from Hawaii's state-of-the art aquaculture facility, and thus reach the consumer well fed and in optimum condition. They arrive disease-free and relatively unstressed, at the peak of their health and coloration. This gives them a huge headstart over wild-caught seahorses, which are often beat up during capture (specimens taken in trawls, for example, often suffer considerable wear and tear during the collection process) and mishandled at various stops along the way to your local fish store (LFS). By the time they finally arrive at your local dealers, wild-caught seahorses may already have spent a long time in the collector's holding tanks followed by an indefinite stay at a wholesaler and a high-risk respite at your local retailers, and have been exposed to all manner of pathogens and parasites at every stop along the way (Bull and Mitchell, 2002). Due to their need for live foods, they are very likely to have gone unfed during this entire period, and they may have become malnourished by the time they reach your neighborhood fish store (Bull and Mitchell, 2002). And because they were taken from coastal waters, wild seahorses are frequently infested with a variety of pests and parasites ranging from sea lice (Argulus sp.) to nematodes, parasitic copepods and hydroids. Upon arrival, they will need to be quarantined for a period of several weeks, since they may also be carrying disease pathogens such as fungus, Vibrio, or deadly Glugea (Bull and Mitchell, 2002). Captive-raised, high-health seahorses pose no such problems.
The greater adaptability of captive-bred and reared seahorses is another big plus. Cultured seahorses have now achieved a high level of domestication. They are pre-adapted to aquarium conditions and pre-trained to eat easily provided frozen foods. Because they are raised at much greater population densities than seahorses experience in nature, captive-bred specimens are accustomed to living in close quarters and withstand crowding much better than wild-caught 'horses. Consequently, farm-raised seahorses have little difficulty adjusting to life in a captive environment. By contrast, field studies show that, in the wild, seahorses have a distribution pattern that can best be described as patchy, meaning they are few and far between, and that a female typically enjoys a home territory of up to 100 square meters (Vincent and Sadler, 1995). It stands to reason that wild-caught seahorses may have a more difficult time acclimating to life in captivity than farm-raised ponies that are literally born and bred for life in the aquarium. And that means that wild-caught seahorses will be under more stress in captivity, at least initially (Giwojna, May 2002).
This was most evident when captive bred seahorses first became readily available around the turn of the century. In those days, it was customary for many hobbyists to maintain wild-caught and captive-bred specimens side-by-side in the same tank, since they already had wild seahorses and eagerly added farmed-raised ponies to their herds when they were first offered by breeders. Very often, when disease outbreaks occurred in such setups, the wild specimens were all lost while the captive-bred seahorses emerged unscathed, or if they developed symptoms, were able to fight off the affliction and recover none the worse for wear.
The bottom line is that captive bred and raised seahorses are simply hardier, more disease resistant, easier to maintain and longer lived in captivity than their wild-caught counterparts. They reach the hobbyist well fed, in peak condition, and already accustomed to aquarium life and frozen foods (Giwojna, May 2002). On the other hand, wild-caught seahorses typically arrive at your local fish store in poor shape, suffering from near starvation and the trauma of capture (Bull and Mitchell, 2002). Mishandling combined with malnutrition stresses these animals and impairs their immune systems, making them prone to disease (Bull and Mitchell, 2002; Lidster 2003).
So you're going to greatly increase your chances for success with these amazing aquatic equines simply by obtaining extremely adaptable captive-bred-and-raised seahorses directly from the breeder this time around. As an added bonus, you will find that Ocean Rider seahorses are highly gregarious animals that very much enjoy the company of others of their kind and genuinely seemed to enjoy interacting with their keepers as well. My Mustangs eat right from my hand and would allow me to lift them out of the water afterwards, still attached to my fingers, if I didn't gently shoo them away first. So I don't think shyness is going to be a problem with your new domesticated seahorses.
Yup, I found your additional questions about the care and keeping of seahorses in your earlier post and I have done my best to answer them one by one. You can read my replies to your inquiries in our previous discussion thread at the following URL, Christine:
Best of luck with your new seahorse setup, Christine!
Respectfully, Pete Giwojna
| | The administrator has disabled public write access.
lloveless
User Coastal Cruiser
Posts: 26
Karma: 3
Re:Welcome - 2006/10/16 02:22Christine, Welcome to the board. As someone who has a wild-caught H. Redeii, I would like to second everything Pete has said about the wild caught. Ours won't even look at a brine shrimp, will eat mysids(live) readily. Frozen mysid she tried one of and looks at them but won't eat anymore. So between gammarus, red volcanos, and a few mysids that we raise she doesn't get much else(maybe other copepods from the live rock). If you want seahorses buy captive bred. I didn't know the differences when I obtained mine from the lfs-felt sorry for it in such a small tank etc. She/he is healthy and other than the frustration with keeping enough live food for it the experience ROCKS. Sincerely, Lawrence
| | The administrator has disabled public write access.
jkief86
User Bottom Dweller
Posts: 2
Karma: 0
Re:Welcome - 2007/01/18 08:41hi names jerome, i have a 40XH(20x18x30in), 4 sunbursts from Ocean Rider and thier great! love the forums, very knowledgeable.
| | The administrator has disabled public write access.
thornoelle
User Bottom Dweller
Posts: 4
Karma: 0
Re:Welcome - 2007/02/07 23:58Hi All, I am Suzanne and I am eagerly waiting for my tank to finish cycling so that I can add my first OR seahorses! I hope to learn lots from my time here. I have already spent a fair bit of time reading on the website and have learned a lot already. Thanks.
| | The administrator has disabled public write access.
