60 million seahorses disappear every year due to traditional Asian medicine

Climate change, overfishing, and poaching threaten Seahorses, a species that people capture in staggering numbers - over sixty million each year. Traditional Asian medicine primarily uses these creatures, Miquel Planas, a CSIC researcher, states.

Planas, who leads the Marine Ecology and Resources group at CSIC, anticipates that rising ocean temperatures due to climate change will cause some species, currently not found beyond Holland or Great Britain, to migrate further north.

However, one of the most significant threats to seahorses (Hippocampus) comes from their use in traditional Chinese medicine. The CSIC researcher attributes various health benefits to these recipes, some of which are scientifically corroborated while others are not.

Action of the mafias

Mafias are active in regions with large seahorse populations, such as Peru and southern Portugal, where they capture these creatures illegally. Authorities in Spain, particularly in Malaga, have seized thousands of seahorses that people illegally caught and prepared for shipment to China for use in traditional medicine.

Another significant threat to this species is the human-induced destruction of their habitats, including areas of macroalgae or marine plants like Posidonia or Zostera. According to Planas, we lose an area equivalent to a football field of these plant communities worldwide every half hour.

In an effort to protect the species, the NGO Oceánidas has initiated the Save Little Big Seahorse project. Under the guidance of Miquel Planas, the project aims to conserve existing seahorse populations with the help of a Marine Watchers Network, which comprises over 2,000 divers.

Andalusia and Galicia

The researcher explains that the Mediterranean is much more susceptible to the appearance of these animals and points out that, since Oceanids, reports have come in about up to six colonies of seahorses in Andalusia and the Galician Atlantic.

Planas emphasizes the importance of continued investment in research to identify seahorse habitats. There are still “not many observations in the Cantabrian Sea,” which hinders species protection efforts.

Currently, the seahorse is not listed in the Spanish catalog of threatened species due to a lack of data and studies on its status and population. The number of seahorses has nearly halved in the last fifty years.

In Spain, there are two species of seahorses, ‘Hippocampus hippocampus’ and ‘Hippocampus guttulatus’. Worldwide researchers have discovered over 50 species of seahorses, mostly in the Indian and Pacific oceans. However, only Spain has these two species.

These species typically inhabit shallow depths, usually up to ten meters. However, in Australian waters, they can be found at depths of up to one hundred meters.

One fascinating aspect of these syngnathids (a family that includes seahorses, pipefish, and water dragons) is that they are the only species where the male takes care of the eggs and embryos. The female begins to produce a new batch of eggs while the male is still incubating the previous ones.

Seahorses live for about four to five years. They limit their reproduction as they only breed between spring and autumn, and each time, they lay only about 350 eggs. They are also unique in being the only fish that swim vertically. This adaptation aids their camouflage in seagrass meadows. They are capable of mimicking their surroundings and hiding from predators, which are usually larger fish.

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