By now, you are probably saying, "Who the heck are you?!" Well, we are Carol Cozzi-Schmarr, founder and president of Ocean Rider Inc., America's largest seahorse aquaculturing facility, and Christopher Burns, your average Joe Aquarist who has a passion for odd fish that like to hold your hand.  Carol has been in the marine aquaculture industry for 15 years, has a degree in Marine Biology, and has dived just about every cool reef there is.  Chris on the other hand, has a background in physics and entertainment, and prefers to sit in the dark watching his multitude of fish tanks, taking copious notes, and correlating the data to further his own private research.  He has kept and bred a wide variety of seahorses for over 6 years, and has maintained marine aquariums for over a decade.

Now that we have been properly introduced, we would like to take this first column to talk about a very important issue surrounding seahorses: conservation.  This tends to be a very touchy subject in the aquarium community, but we are going to go out on a limb and state our position so that you all know where we are coming from, and can rest assured that we are straight shooters.  Conservation for marine ornamentals, especially seahorses, which are highly threatened in many parts of the world, is imperative.  With the success of seahorse aquafarming, there has become little to no reason to support wild-caught horses.  The world's wild populations of these animals are diminishing by the millions each year, and although the curio industry and Traditional Chinese Medicine still take the lion's share of horses fished out of the ocean, we hobbyists are contributing in an alarming capacity.  The problem for we hobbyists is that with such a lack of information available, newcomers to seahorses (or sometimes even to marine aquaria in general) are enticed by the allure of the seahorse to buy them.  The aquarists gets the horses home, they take ill and die, and then the aquarist goes off to the fish store to buy more seahorses.  This increases the demand, which forces fish retailers to find more horses, which inevitably come from the ocean, which are not well suited for the home aquarium environment.  It is our goal here to help raise the base education level of keepers and would-be keepers so that their charges have the best possible chance of survival in the sometimes-brutal environment that is the home aquarium.  It is well worth the effort to learn how to take care of these magnificent animals, as they will bring you hours of enjoyment and relaxation.

That said, let's look at a couple of questions!

Question:
We were considering a 55-gallon tank and plan on having living rock, anemones, a couple of clown fish, and seahorses.  I was figuring that we would purchase a pair (possibly pregnant pair) and I would like some advise to make sure that our tank is ready for them.

Christopher:
Well, there are a couple of issues at stake here.  First off, seahorses are typically kept in a "species tank" (a tank dedicated to one type of fish), because they are inefficient swimmers and slow eaters.  When you begin adding in other fish, there will almost always be a shortage of food for the seahorses because they just cannot get to it quickly enough.  Also, clowns are very territorial and aggressive, and thus, do not make good tank-mates for seahorses.

The anemone is just a bad idea with seahorses.  Their natural environment does not generally include these creatures, so seahorses are unaware of the potential danger.  If a seahorse were to try to hitch to an anemone, or even if the horse was swimming by and got caught in a current, it would easily end up a meal for the anemone.  They aren't strong enough swimmers to pull themselves free.

Finally, in a 55-gallon tank, there is a bit of a stocking density issue.  In order for the horses to find enough food without expending too much energy in the search, you will either need to target feed the horses at each feeding (with the filtration and pumps off), or have more horses.  The reason to have more horses is so that you can take advantage of a natural feeding response that horses share.  When one horse finds food, they will alert the others, either by a clicking noise or by the actual feeding sounds.  You can actually watch one find something to eat and very shortly thereafter, the others will come around to see what is going on.  In a 55-gallon tank, dedicated to seahorses, you could keep anywhere from 10 to 24 horses, depending on the size of the species you decide on.  This stocking density will help ensure that they are all able to get directly to food, and will remove some of the burden of target feed them at every meal.

A final note of buying pregnant male seahorses:  PLEASE DO NOT BUY PREGNANT WILD-CAUGHT MALE SEAHORSES.  Buying them from aquaculturists is fine, but when you buy pregnant males from distributors that get them from the ocean, not only are you taking one life out of the wild, but you are removing the up to 1500 babies, as well as breaking up a potential lifelong pair bond, so that the female, if she has been left in the wild may never reproduce again.  As you can see, buying one wild-caught pregnant male seahorse can cost the ocean and its population of wild seahorses far more than one animal.

Question:
How do I keep my tank clean if I am only supposed to keep seahorses in it?

Christopher:
I am going to address this as a tank mates question and leave the filtration schema for another time.  Although we generally hear about "species tanks" being solely dedicated to the containment of a single species, seahorses can definitely be kept with a wide array of other organisms.  In order to keep your tank clean, a good clean-up crew is a must.  This should consist of algae-grazing, and detritivorous hermit crabs, algae grazing snails, and a colony of other very cool, but relatively unknown detritivorous snails.  I recommend Scarlet Reef Hermits (Paguristes cadenati), Left-Handed Hermits (Caleinus laevimanus), Blue-Legged Hermits (Clibanarius tricolor), and Mexican Hermits (Clibanarius digueti) for algae control.  These guys will generally be well suited for your seahorse tank, and should pose no threat to adult horses or their fry.  However, in the dwarf seahorse (Hippocampus zostrae) or other "miniature" species' tank, Blue-Legged Hermits may pose a problem, so avoid those if you plan to keep "miniature" species.  For snails, I recommend Astreas (Astrea sp.), Ceriths (Cerithium strercusmuscarum), and Nerites (Nerita funiculate).  Finally, what no seahorse tank should be without, I give you the Nassarius snail (Nassarius variegates).  These guys are not only cute and comical, but MAN! can they put away the detritus!  They are able to "sniff" out carrion at great distances using an elephant-like trunk.  When they smell food, they literally erupt from their subterranean homes and dart to the food - fast!

As far as stocking levels go, I recommend one to two hermits per gallon, mix and match species for variety, but, as with any hermit crab, be sure to have plenty of extra shells on hand for when they grow, or they will kill each other off fighting for larger homes.  With the snails, again, I recommend one to two per gallon, and mix and match.  Nassarius snails, I recommend a minimum of 1.5 per gallon (please don't cut the snails in half... just round up), but do not exceed two per gallon.  These levels will keep your tank very clean, eliminating much of the need for vacuuming and siphoning out built-up detritus from the rockwork.