03 Jun, 2008

Soon after arriving at Rooney’s Reef, the crew finds the little creature that has been so elusive.

Today we went back to Rooney's Reef, in South Africa's Sodwana Bay, to try to find a seahorse again. This induces nervous twitches now, as we have tried to find this elusive creature before and, in doing so, we managed to fog the camera lens.

We felt we had to do justice to the seahorse before we left Sodwana Bay, so we headed out to Rooney's to try again.

It must have been two or three minutes after we hit bottom that I heard crew member Grant Brokensha yelling at me into the water. Judging by his enthusiastic movements, he had found what we were looking for.

The little rusty-coloured seahorse was clinging tenaciously to what remained of a stunted hydroid. These animals seem so ungainly and immobile that it’s hard to take them seriously as a successful reef inhabitant.

The Hippocampus family in general has taken a bizarre option on reproduction, gestation and also the simple physical construction of the body of this animal.

The female deposits up to 2 000 eggs in the brood pouch of the male. The eggs are then fertilised, and the male is responsible for the gestation of the eggs. The male seahorse controls the water salinity and various other factors. When the eggs hatch, he squirts the young out, effectively giving birth to them.

Finding this creature was a real conquest for us, but for the most part, it was simply a privilege to be able to study this little creature, existing in its own strange way.

– by Graeme Duane, Earth-Touch crew © Earth-Touch

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