And there's got to be a way of harnessing these three different converging needs for seahorses in the wild. Yes, I just got back at the end of February 1997. In Vietnam, I was checking up on a project I have there with four biologists from the Institute of Oceanography. We're just beginning village training on raising seahorses in captivity with the idea of providing local fishers with an alternative to catching the wild seahorses. I understand that raising seahorses in tanks is a real challenge.
Seahorses are tricky little creatures.
They need to eat live food only. They're really voracious predators contrary to their sort of pleasant benign appearance. And seahorses also get a lot of diseases. So rearing baby seahorses is an exercise in trying to draw together a whole host of different tiny food sources, which means you have to culture the algae to feed the little food items to feed the seahorses. And it's complicated to do that well enough to have reliable supplies for large numbers of animals.