Feeling Blue Little Seahorse?

I happen to LOVE seahorses – those little sea monsters that are so darned cute and intriguing.  I could sit and watch them for hours.  As a matter of fact, I have.  I have often wished that I had the time required to properly maintain a large aquarium so I could keep them for pets.  When we travel we always go to the local zoo and I check to see if they have seahorses.  Our local zoo (Rosamond Gifford Zoo opened a brand new seahorse exhibit.  It’s not super huge like some I’ve seen but it has a nice layout and the seahorses looked healthy as they swam about.  A few facts about seahorses if you are curious:  seahorses are fish but do not have scales like fish, they have skin that covers bony plates arranged in rings in their body.  Seahorses swim upright and can swim horizontally AND vertically.  Males carry and give birth to baby seahorses.  There is very little data on wild seahorse populations but given how overfished so many other fish populations are I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that seahorse populations are overfished as well.  Wild seahorses do not survive very well in captivity due to stress and the difficulty of feeding them a balanced diet of live food.  Captive bred seahorses seem less stressed and will eat frozen shrimp and other frozen foods.  If you are an aquarium owner and want to keep seahorses please do your part and try to ensure you are purchasing captive raised seahorses.  Wild seahorses around the world will thank you.

Here’s a picture I took of one of the seahorses at our zoo.  He was just staring at me!  I can’t wait to go back and see them again!!

Photo information:  5D Mark III, 100 mm macro lens, using manual exposure – 1/200s, f/4, ISO 6400.  No flash.

If you like this picture you can see some of my other photographs here.