I just don’t get it. How can our society act so goddamned normal about seahorses. How can anybody so casually accept that that’s a fish???
This is one of nature’s most anatomically perverse of all beasts. A FISH, like a carp or a bass or a beta is a fish, but it bent its body straight up only to bend its head permanently back down. It stretched its skull into a pipe. It tapered its tail like a lizard, specifically like a chameleon. It can also move its eyes independently by the way, you know, like a chameleon. Fun fact, it can change color to express its mood, like you know whatever does that. It doesn’t properly swim anymore. It buzzes its few remaining fins like an insect’s wings to float itself around at a snail’s pace. It lives its whole life clinging to coral branches or seaweed, which means it decided to become a “tree dweller” in an environment where gravity didn’t even matter anyway. The males get pregnant. They make noises at each other by rubbing some of their neck bones together. Every day, EVERY DAY a mated pair does a little dance and a little neck bone song so they remember which two seahorses they were. They’re a beautiful precious obscenity. Nothing so adorable ever made such a strong case against a logical creator.
They have as little skin and meat as they could get away with. Their skeleton is almost all they are.
This thing is one of the most successful hunters on the planet. Because their mouth is fused shut, except for the tip, they can create a powerful suction force in front of that one little opening in order to draw in prey.
Lions have a 20-30% success rate on their hunts, depending on daytime and if they’re in a group. Great white sharks, anywhere from 40% to 80%, depending on the size and skill of the individual. Dragonflies, which are one of the most successful terrestrial hunters, can hit about 80-85%. Seahorses? 90% success rate, sometimes more. Only a fraction of their prey escapes that powerful vacuum. They’re incredibly precise.
If you touch them, they feel hard, because of the skeleton underneath their skin. Their tails are being studied to make coiling bridges, because of how strong that interlocked structure is. Different species range in size from over a foot long, to barely an inch.
Behold: not just a fish, but a wildly successful predator!
horsey
don’t forget their majestic cousins the sea dragons! these are the leafy and weedy sea dragons
and the newest seahorse family member, discovered in 2015, the ruby sea dragon ❤️
Yeah that’s when someone tried to straighten the seahorse back out and it still didn’t look right. The more they bent and mushed it in their hands to look like a fish again the worse they fucked it up until finally they just left it and walked off and hoped nobody would ask who did this
(I love them so much)
Oh, so it’s actually the ruby sea dragon on a string! Got it.
i doubt that someone hasn’t already brought them up in another reblog but anyways. don’t forget about pipefish! relatives of seahorses which are literally as physically close to a worm on a string as any real animal could get, imo
@icarusfoalls
The family which Seahorses belong is known as Syngnathidae they have two more members in this family Pipefish and Seadragons, the males of these family give birth to there offspring.
Seahorse can give birth to around 1000-1500 fry (babies of seahorse are known as fry in plural maybe fries) but only one or two of them survives. Seahorses leave there fries to find there own food from the moment they are born and abandon them in most of the cases so that is the reason of there declining population with the habitat loss.
Pipefishes do the same and they prefer large male partner to mate bc of the embryo size to produce healthy offspring.
