Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, November 24, 1995 TAG: 9511300013
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Medium
In the Orient, sea horses are caught by the thousands and ground into powder that's sold as an aphrodisiac. But to a sea horse, getting in the mood for sex means a little shrimp.
As mysterious as their stallion heads and question-mark shapes, sea horses long have stymied scientists trying to keep them healthy enough in captivity to observe breeding habits.
After 18 months of study, researchers at Nauticus and the Virginia Marine Science Museum have broken new ground, successfully raising a handful of sea horses in a Nauticus aquarium. The key, it turned out, was a good meal.
``We found a food source that allowed the sea horses to stay alive and that was cost effective,'' said Jeff Campsen, senior aquarist at Nauticus, a maritime museum on Norfolk's waterfront. ``Once we did that, the sea horses started breeding.''
Sea horses captured in their natural habitat and placed in tanks often face a short life. Few mate, and the offspring seldom survive to maturity.
``They usually go through slow starvation,'' said Julian Sprung, science editor of the quarterly Aquarium Frontiers magazine. ``They'll last a couple of years, but they're not in tiptop shape for spawning.''
Donald Swift, a professor of oceanography at Old Dominion University, said he used to catch the exotic-looking creatures for his home aquarium, but they never lasted long.
``My aquarium was always a jail from which the only escape was the grave,'' he said.
Campsen and George Paleudis at the Marine Science Museum in Virginia Beach embarked on a search to improve the odds of sea horse survival in captivity.
They determined that the creatures' usual diet, brine shrimp, didn't provide enough nutrition. So they obtained some freshwater shrimp called mysis.
Bought in frozen blocks and thawed, the mysis were just what the sea horses needed. The change in diet soon led to reproduction.
``We were making them happy, so they started to go ahead and have sex,'' Campsen said.
Sea horses have an unusual way of making more sea horses. The males, not the females, get pregnant and carry the young in a pouch for the three weeks between fertilization and birth.
Usually, males start the courtship. But at Nauticus, the aggressors were the females.
According to an article written by Campsen and Paleudis and published in the latest Aquarium Frontiers issue, a number of females would launch into ``reproductive displays'' with the same male at one time.
The researchers speculated that the change in roles could have resulted from different social pressures between wild and captive sea horse colonies.
Whatever the reason, breeding in captivity created a new food problem - the newborns were too small to eat mysis shrimp.
So the researchers tried a bug-looking crustacean called amphipods.
The young sea horses, moved into an isolated tank filled with amphipods, began to grow. From an original group of 15, five sea horses made it through the trial and were placed in a regular exhibit tank.
The one-third survival rate represents a remarkable improvement from zero, said Campsen, speaking like a proud papa.
``These things don't come with instruction manuals,'' Paleudis said
by CNB