Seahorses get help to stay afloat
GEORGE TOWN: It’s an intriguing sea creature, with a peculiar
snout and long neck.
And do you know that it’s the male seahorse that lays the eggs?
Here at the Penang Fisheries Research Institute (FRI), over
1,000 seahorses have been successfully bred in a project to reverse its risk of
extinction.
The FRI is almost ready to share its seahorse breeding know-how
on a commercial scale to stop them from being harvested in the wild.
“We managed to get them tank-bred into the eighth generation.
“This means we can domesticate seahorses, ” said FRI’s Tunku
Abdul Rahman Aquarium manager Mohamad Saupi Ismail.
He said the project started in 2013 and they produced enough
seahorses to release hundreds into the wild.
“The place we release the seahorses is a secret because we don’t
want anyone to just go there and harvest them.
“Our purpose is to see if domesticated seahorses will thrive in
the wild, ” he said.
He said FRI had successfully domesticated three species: the
zebra-snouted seahorse and three-spotted seahorse, which are native to
Malaysia; and the big-bellied seahorse, a large Australian species that can
grow up to 35cm in length.
Mohamad Saupi said the Tunku Abdul Rahman Aquarium was the first
institution in Malaysia and possibly South-East Asia to successfully breed the
Australian seahorse.
“We want to teach fishermen and fish farmers how to breed
seahorses. It is quite lucrative, ” he said.
He said that while seahorses were considered endangered, they
were in a category where the licence to breed them was allowed.
Dried seahorse can be bought online for RM750 for 250g, giving
it a retail price of RM3,000 per kg.
As an aquarium fish (yes, it is a fish), seahorses can retail at
between RM300 and RM2,200 each, according to a United States report in March on
the aquarium fish trade.
In traditional Chinese medicine, dried seahorse is used in
concoctions for infertility, baldness, asthma and arthritis.
It can be found in many Chinese medicine shops in Malaysia.
According to a 2012 research published in the Natural Product
Research journal, scientists proved that a peptide in the common seahorse
(Hippocampus kuda), easily found throughout the Indo-Pacific, can cure
arthritis and its associated inflammation.
Research papers in 1996 and 2002 showed that seahorses indeed
have a positive effect on erectile dysfunction and can be used for tumours,
ageing and fatigue.
The one-of-a-kind biological feature about the seahorse is that
it is the male that gets pregnant.
Instead of the male ejaculating semen like all other animals,
the female ejaculates eggs into the male’s belly.
The male then fertilises the eggs internally and bears them
until tiny baby seahorses swim out.
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