Science Today: Pygmy Seahorses | California Academy of Sciences

Academy researchers are among the first to study tiny, fascinating pygmy seahorses that live exclusively on coral in the Philippines.

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Closed Caption:

The pygmy seahorses
are remarkable little animals.
Their camouflage is so amazingly good.
You really have a hard time
seeing them against the coral
unless you know what you're looking for
and even then, it's really difficult
to see what they're doing.
They live in this obligate relationship
with another animal, coral.
And they're only found
on that one coral.
It's the only place you ever find them.
They spend their entire lives, almost,
living attached to that coral.
We thought this would be
a great animal to bring in.
No one's worked with it,
no one's had success with it.
So we thought,
if we can bring them back
and get them established here,
in a controlled environment,
we could make observations
and study various aspects
of their biology
and their life history
that's just unknown to science.
I challenged the aquarium staff
to keep that coral alive.
We collected some pieces of it
back in 2011, and we actually kept it
and grew it for about three years
before we even attempted
to collect the seahorses,
just to make sure that we could
keep its home alive,
so that we had a better chance
of keeping them happy and healthy.
We collected them in the Philippines,
as part of the
Philippines Biodiversity Expedition
that the Academy went on in May 2014.
You never want to touch the seahorse.
You don't want to just
pluck it off because
it will damage and hurt it.
Obviously, it's so small.
So what we do is
we take a cutting of the coral,
a fragment of the coral,
and sort of coax them
to go onto that.
And once they're on that,
they stay firmly attached to that,
they go into a jar,
and then we slowly bring them
up to the surface.
And these were so special,
that we essentially went from
the collection in the wild
and then immediately got them
on a plane in Manila
and immediately shipped them back here.
From the time they were in the wild
to the time they were
in an aquarium in San Francisco,
was, I think, something like 36 hours.
They like it pretty well.
They've been breeding,
so that's kind of an indication
of "liking-ness."
And then all of a sudden
they started producing babies.
The male gave birth to babies in captivity,
which is amazing
and something we couldn't
have predicted to happen.
Of the challenges in keeping
and displaying them,
there are really two.
The first is that they're very small,
so you've got to get them food,
and you've got to get
the coral they eat food,
and you've got to make sure they're eating.
So they eat a lot of tiny, tiny foods
that we have to keep alive and find
and be able to grow here ourselves.
And the challenges of displaying them,
of course, is going to be
the same thing:
They're very, very small.
We've had lots of discussions
about possible ways to make them
viewable for the public.
They're only the size of
my thumbnail when they're adults.
My favorite part about caring for them
is that everything is new.
There is a lot of stuff that's unknown.
Nobody had ever actually witnessed
the birth of the species, ever before.
So we were the first to observe that.
We're just looking forward
to being able to spend
a bunch of time writing this up.
They're just so highly adapted
to life, to the niche that they live in.
They're so specialized to live
and mimic this coral so perfectly.
They're just a really great story
about evolution and biodiversity--
just life persisting
in the strangest places.
And they're really a joy to work with.