Magical Creatures AN APPRECIATION OF THE SEAHORSE

The allure of these little fish is a potent mix of otherworldliness and intrigue. They are amazingly tiny, rare and shy; their looks are far from fish-like, and they’re very particular about where they live. For such minute organisms (some as small as 2cm high), they pack in a lot of magic.

Take their looks. There aren’t many fish that swim upright. This quirk of posture was certainly what first drew me to them. That and their unmistakable silhouette – an elegant loop of curled tail, spine and snout. Seahorses’ bead-like eyes are compelling, too: they have reptilian brilliance, and can move in different directions. This allows them to keep an eye out for predators behind them, while they focus on snaffling miniscule crustacean prey.

Then there’s their apparent ‘shyness’ – a challenge for even the most experienced of seekers. All 50-plus species are expert hiders, glimpsed if you’re lucky in shallow reed beds, or among the shadows of a reef. It’s vital a seahorse can hide, as it cannot swim away from predators, only drift, anchoring itself with its prehensile tail, around an obliging stem. To add to its disguise, its bony plates share with the chameleon the ability to camouflage themselves.

Imagine, then, that you’d never seen one on a bathroom tile, decorating a pub sign, or glinting on a necklace. Put yourself in the sandals of an ancient Greek and consider how startled you might be to come across this weeny armoured monster. It’s little wonder seahorses made it into Greek mythology: seahorse-inspired hippocamps (think horse-mermaid) proved trusty steeds for sea nymphs, as well as providing horsepower for Poseidon’s chariot.

There’s a touch of girlpower to endear seahorses to us, too. Females command territories 100 times bigger than those typical of males. And, in a unique feat of role reversal, it’s the male that has the babies (fry). A male seahorse receives eggs from the female into a pouch, where he fertilises, then nurtures them until they’re ready to drift alone.

One particular lone, drifting seahorse recently captured imaginations worldwide, photographed while hooked onto a discarded cotton bud (search online for ‘Justin Hofman seahorse’). The contrast between the graceful fish and its manmade anchor is shocking – the former such a delight to find, the latter so shameful. It’s the plight of our oceans distilled into a single picture.

But it’s not all gloom. Two species of seahorse that are native to UK waters, the short snouted and the spiny, have been sighted repeatedly in brackish stretches of the Thames over the past year, suggesting they’ve made these now cleaner waters home once more. It gives me great comfort to think of these fantastical fish so near at hand. Magical they may be, but faraway? Not so much. An important reminder that this magic is real.