THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, November 13, 1995 TAG: 9511110072
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Larry Maddry
LENGTH: Medium: 85 lines
FEMALES COURT MALE sea horses. They brush up against them, wink and carry on. This leads to sex. The female impregnates the male.
And the next thing you know the male sea horse is floating up and down in the tank with perhaps 100 or more sea horses in its belly. Twenty-one days after fertilization, the male gives birth to the babies.
Those fortunate enough to have witnessed sea horses emerging from the male's broodpouch say it is an amazing sight.
A cloud of the babies emerges from the pouch, looking like tiny, pin-sized question marks.
Unfortunately, when the sea horses are in captivity, the death rate of the babies is close to 99 percent.
But that may change because of a cooperative project involving two Hampton Roads museums that has attempted to increase the survival rate for baby sea horses at Nauticus.
Last week I went down to see what was going on at Nauticus. Jeff Campsen, the aquarist there, showed me the glass-fronted tank where 25 sea horses were either hanging out with their tails on eel grass or floating up and down
Campsen said the smaller sea horses had been birthed in the museum and are doing well. There were five of the juveniles, he said.
``There goes one,'' he said, pointing to a sea horse about 3 inches long.
He said sea horses give birth early in the morning ``We've found here in the museum that males who are about to give birth release the babies within a few minutes after we turn on the lights.''
Campsen, 25, has taken a paternal interest in the sea horses born at Nauticus because so much effort has gone into their survival.
``We can always simply purchase more sea horses,'' he said. ``But more than the matter of price is the preservation of the sea horses that are in their natural habitat. We'd like to leave them where they are.''
He said the museum purchased 20 of the sea horses about a year-and-half ago, but efforts to raise their babies to healthy juveniles had failed.
``A male may release 150 of the babies,'' he said. ``So they scatter all over a 200-gallon tank like this one,'' he said.
The babies get trapped in the drains and die. Or they may link their tails together and refuse to eat. Or they may become food for other sea horses, he said.
But the main problem is diet. Very little has been known about the proper diet for sea horses prior to adulthood. And not much is known about adults.
Through trial and error Campsen, with the help of George Paleudis, the exhibits technician at the Virginia Marine Science Museum, has developed a relatively inexpensive and successful method of raising the babies to healthy juveniles with food that is appropriate to the size of the growing sea horse.
They began by removing the newborn sea horses to a 5-gallon saltwater tank made of Styrofoam, which had eel grass in the bottom. Then they tried hatching brine shrimp. ``The young ones ate well, plenty of the newly hatched brine shrimp. But they still got skinny and died,'' he explained.
That's when Paleudis suggested that amphipods might be a good food for the intermediate juveniles. The Virginia Marine Science Museum had plenty of amphipods - very small crustaceans that look like tiny bugs - which collect on algae filters at the Virginia Beach museum.
Amphipods, it turned out, are available in a variety of sizes at least some of which would be a suitable prey regardless of how small or large the infant sea horses were. Campsen and Paledus found that a fresh water shrimp called the ``mysis'' worked well at the next stage of development.
Once all the animals were eating mysis regularly and had reached a length of 2 inches they were returned to the 200-gallon display tank.
They had begun with 15 sea horses and five had survived on the diet. That's a survival rate of 33 percent.
That may seem like a small accomplishment, but since preparing a paper on the subject of ``Captive Breeding and Culture of the Lined Seahorse,'' Campsen and Paleudis have been getting calls from aquatic museums in Connecticut, Texas, California and Massachusetts about their diet for infant sea horses.
An article on the subject will appear in Aquarium Frontiers magazine.
It could mean museums with sea horses will never again have to replenish their supply from the outside world. ``With proper diet we may be able to get a survival rate of 70 percent,'' Campsen said. ILLUSTRATION: LAWRENCE JACKSON
The Virginian-Pilot
Sea horses at Nauticus are fed shrimp to increase their chances of
survival
by CNB