The seahorse is a very cute animal, and the cute baby seahorse is particularly touching. Here are 12 pictures of the most popular baby seahorse.
Baby seahorses look exactly like their parents-just smaller and cuter. Like parents, baby seahorses are very poor swimmers. Their small size and poor swimming skills lead to a very low survival rate: only 5 out of every 1,000 baby seahorses can reach adulthood healthily.
In order to understand why there is a pink seahorse baby, we must start with its parents. Male seahorses and female seahorses perform a "courtship dance" in the early morning, with their tails intertwined and swimming in the water, and sometimes they even change color.
Finally, when the hippocampus passed the love period, the male hippocampus began to use its kangaroo-like pouch to pump water, showing its empty pouch to the female hippocampus, and suggesting that it was ready to accept eggs. Then, they spiral from mouth to mouth and perform a mating dance.
With their bodies attached to each other, the female seahorse uses its tubular ovipositor to lay 50 to 2,000 eggs into the male seahorse's pouch. The male hippocampus gently shakes to let the egg enter the hatching cavity. After successful fertilization, the fertilized egg will adhere to the spongy inner wall of the nursing bag. After laying eggs, the female hippocampus will swim away, leaving the child-rearing work to the male hippocampus.
When everything is ready, the male seahorse's pouch is sealed to protect the future seahorse baby. During pregnancy, the male hippocampus will produce a prolactin, feed the fertilized egg and adjust the salinity of the water in the nursing bag to ensure that the future hippocampus baby can adapt to the marine environment after birth.
It takes about 10 to 25 days for the baby hippocampus to incubate. At that time, the muscles of the male hippocampus begin to contract and push the baby hippocampus out of the pouch. Father seahorse often grabs something, such as seaweed, and begins to distort himself to "expel" the baby seahorse from the pouch. The whole process will last for several hours. If a baby seahorse is unfortunately left in the pouch, it will eventually die and rot, which is bad news for father seahorse, because it may also be infected and eventually die. Another theory holds that during mating, small bubbles containing bacterial infection may also enter the pouch.
Unlike other fish species, seahorse parents don't eat them, which is the most parents can do. Once the baby seahorses leave the pouch, they will survive on their own. The first thing they need to do is to catch something to avoid being washed away by the ocean air. Once they find their own support, they can start to feed-usually on tiny creatures in the ocean.
In the first few days, baby seahorses face a lot of survival challenges. In addition to being washed into the water where the temperature is too high or too low to live, they may also become the prey of predators.
Sadly, baby seahorses have to face more than just threats from nature. Environmental pollution and habitat loss caused by human activities make the number of baby seahorses that can be found in the natural environment less and less. In addition, marine fishing further reduced the number of adult seahorses, which in turn led to a decrease in population. These comprehensive factors lead to the survival threat of 35 species of hippocampus all over the world.
In order to curb the decreasing trend of seahorse species, aquariums all over the world are trying to breed artificially. Because the little hippocampus needs special food to survive, this problem still faces great challenges at present.
Fortunately, some success has been achieved in hippocampus culture recently. Ideally, we will find a new way to clean up the ocean, and the baby hippocampus can continue to be born and grow in the natural environment.