Animal · United States, Bahamas, Cuba
Lined seahorse
Hippocampus erectus — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The lined seahorse is a strange, slow-moving fish that swims upright and grips seagrass with its tail. It lives in shallow seagrass beds and reefs along the western Atlantic coast.
Picture credit: SEFSC Pascagoula Laboratory; Collection of Brandi Noble, NOAA/NMFS/SEFSC. (Public domain) · Stevenj (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the lined seahorse live?
Home: Seagrass beds and coral reefs of the western Atlantic Ocean.
In the wild you find it in: United States, Bahamas, Cuba, Belize, Venezuela.
Conservation status from the IUCN: vulnerable.
The short profile
Fully grown it measures 12–17 cm long. On the menu: meat.
The story behind it
Seahorses are one of the very few animals where the male becomes pregnant: the female deposits her eggs into a pouch on the male's belly, and he carries and nourishes them for several weeks before giving birth to dozens or even hundreds of tiny baby seahorses. A seahorse swims upright using a small fin on its back that beats up to 35 times a second, making it a weak swimmer that instead relies on wrapping its flexible tail around seagrass or coral to anchor itself against currents. It has no teeth and no stomach, instead sucking up tiny shrimp-like creatures through its long snout almost constantly throughout the day. Lined seahorses are collected for aquariums and traditional medicine and lose vital seagrass habitat to coastal development, making them vulnerable.
Find it on the globe
Lined seahorse is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Do male seahorses really get pregnant?
Yes, male seahorses are one of the only animals that carry developing young. The female places her eggs into a pouch on his belly, where he nourishes them for several weeks before giving birth to the babies.
Are seahorses good swimmers?
Not really. Seahorses swim upright and quite slowly using a small back fin, so they usually anchor themselves to seagrass or coral with their flexible tail instead of swimming against strong ocean currents.
Why are lined seahorses vulnerable?
Lined seahorses are vulnerable because the seagrass beds they depend on are being lost to coastal development and pollution. They are also collected in large numbers for aquariums and traditional medicine.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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