It’s a Gray Area:

Before we went on our recent trip to the big island of Hawaii, a real estate broker I have been dealing with strongly suggested we visit Ocean Riders Seahorse Farm on the Kona coast.

This is a place that raises seahorses and sea dragons, educates the public about them, and sells them to people for their aquariums. We took her advice, and it was really worth the effort.

As you know, seahorses have a head like a horse, a tail like a monkey, and a pouch like a kangaroo, so they have developed a certain mythical quality. But they actually are real, although I confess that I didn’t know much about them until our visit.

Sea dragons have a similar makeup, but it looks like they have seaweed or kelp growing out of many parts of their bodies.

The female deposits her eggs into the brood pouch of the male, and then, after a one-month period of gestation, the male gives birth to the offspring – and there can be up to 1,800 in one delivery!

Then about two minutes after that, the female again inserts her eggs. As a result, the adult male is not pregnant for a total of only two minutes every month. (Many women in our world probably fantasize about a situation like this, but the seahorses actually live it.)

Seahorses use their prehensile tails to hook onto underwater vegetation, as well as onto each other, and they have protective bony plates in their skin, and a tube-like mouth for sucking in crustaceans.

And many seahorses actually have character! Just like dolphins, they seem to have fun. For example, they wrap their tales around each other and “dance.” To watch them do this is really endearing.

And they don’t mind being touched, to the extent that if you tickle the tip of one’s tail, it will often wrap its tail around your finger.

In fact, the workers at the farm actually have names for some of the seahorses they have grown most fond of. And at the end of our tour, after carefully washing our hands, we were treated to having some of their favorites wrap their tails around our fingers.

Because these are such cute and interesting creatures, there is a big financial incentive that drives many people to capture them in the wild and sell them. But what these people do not know is that it is natural for seahorses to be monogamous, and they usually have only one mate for life. So if one is captured from the ocean, it will almost always pine away for its mate, to the degree that it soon stops eating.