sidonie

My daughter always wanted a tattoo.

I then anxiously waited by the sideline to hear what KIND of tattoo she wanted to get.

I was mildly reassured that it was way better than a weirdly-shaped piercing.

I am not opposed to tattoos, truly yours has a tiny dolphin, a classic,  twirling on my left shoulder blade, or is it the right one…

The is the same daughter who came home one day with pierced ears–pierced without my approval and despite much opiniated debate clearly stating that I was against.

So the suggestion was, when she left the house, that she will get a tiny star on her backside. Lovely. Not even odd.

She came home later that day with a 4-inch long seahorse on her left ankle, or is it the right…

I was against before, still against after.

A seahorse? a horse from the sea? why not a pink poney!

Her argument is that she is a fan of horses and a lover of the ocean. Simple. So my curious mind had to look into this seahorse fantasy and I discovered this:

THE world’s first public aquarium opened in May 1853 in London. The brainchild of Philip Henry Gosse, an English naturalist, the London Fish House unveiled in 1859 four seahorses, long believed to be mythical creatures.

In a Victorian Britain obsessed with the natural world, these seahorses—with their equine heads, pouched torsos and curling tails—were an instant hit. It was as if they swam straight from the pages of a fairy-tale. Visitors were soon flocking to see them in aquariums all over Europe and America.

Although the Victorians started the craze for aquariums and seahorse-keeping that continues today, seahorses have fascinated mankind for millennia. Aboriginal paintings of “rainbow serpents” from 6,000 years ago bear striking similarities to seahorses. The Minoans portrayed them on jewellery, while the ancient Greeks had the “hippocampus” (half horse, half fish) pulling the chariots of Poseidon, the sea god.

In this fascinating book Helen Scales, an aptly named marine biologist, explains the myth, biology and ecology of what the Victorians called “queer fish”. Indeed, the world’s 37 species of seahorse are fish, breathing through gills and using a swim bladder to control their buoyancy. Sizes range from the pygmy seahorse (such as Hippocampus denise), which is smaller than a human fingernail, to the strapping “big-belly” seahorse (Hippocampus abdominalis), which can be nearly a foot (or 30 centimeters) long.

Placid and slow, seahorses do not flee from predators, but instead camouflage themselves, changing their skin color to match their habitat. Anchoring themselves to blades of grass or fingers of coral with their tails, seahorses spend their time feeding on zooplankton; their gulp is among the fastest-known movements of all vertebrates. Most fascinating is that seahorses are the only species in which the males become pregnant, providing the young with food and oxygen before giving birth to up to 1,000 babies, each the size of a flea.

Ms. Scales is clearly bowled over by her subjects. She recalls her first sighting of a wild seahorse as “like glimpsing a unicorn trotting through my garden”. But despite mankind’s professed love for these creatures, around 25m are plucked from the oceans every year, mostly to meet the demand for traditional Chinese medicines.

This threat to seahorse populations has prompted efforts to protect them. Six species have been labelled vulnerable to extinction by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, while the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species began regulating the trade in seahorses in 2004. It is too early to gauge the effectiveness of these moves. But one thing is certain: it would be tragic if seahorses vanished from the oceans to become once more creatures of myth.

 Poseidon’s Steed: The Story of Seahorses, from Myth to Reality.

A book by Helen Scales. Gotham Books; 272 pages; $20. To be published in Britain by Gotham in November. 

With a little help from the Economist.

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