Because there are many marine animals growing in the sea, there may be many friends who think that the seahorse is not a fish, but whether the seahorse is a fish has also been debated for many years, and finally scientists have determined that the seahorse belongs to the fish.
The seahorse breathes with gills and grows a maw to control buoyancy, and is classified as a bony fish of the seahorse genus Hippocampus in the family Sea Dragon family. There are about 50 known species of seahorses, ranging in length from 3 cm to 36 cm, and are small sea creatures.
Seahorses are an out-and-out marine species, mostly found in shallow tropical and subtropical waters, feeding on small shrimp, small fish, algae and plankton. Seahorses eat dozens of times a day, they have no stomach, food is digested quickly through the body, so they have to eat non-stop to replenish energy.
Its 5 very strange features are different from other fish, namely: different appearance of ordinary fish; The head looks like a horse's head; With a freely retractable, curly tail; Move upright up and down left and right; The female lays the eggs in the belly sac of the male. Because of its unique shape in Greek mythology and legend, the seahorse is regarded as the mount of the sea god. Through the following knowledge points, let's learn the lesser-known secrets of the seahorse.
1. Body shape
The body structure of the seahorse, the spine of the fish is covered with a layer of hard bone plate without scales, and the fins are distributed at the bottom of the tail, under the abdomen, and behind the cheeks. Its head resembles a small horse,with deeply sunken eyes, a curved torso, and a slender, curly tail.
2, the head is like a horse's head
It is precisely because the hippocampus is curved from the head to the neck and the mouth is long and narrow, similar to the shape of a horse's head, that the hippocampus got its name. The body of the seahorse gradually becomes smaller from head to tail, forming a tail that looks like a miniature pony.
3. Curly tail
The seahorse can be used like a monkey to catch creatures under the seabed with a curled tail such as corals and seaweed to fix itself and camouflage itself to prey on and avoid predators lobsters, crabs, etc.
They also grab each other's tails and move when they swim in pairs in the water. After the flexible tail of the seahorse hooks the object and fixes it, through the narrow nose, it can suck prey about 3 centimeters away into the mouth.
4. Walk upright
Although the seahorse is a fish, it is not as good as the average fish, and it is rare for the seahorse to swim upright in marine life, and it can move slowly up and down, left and right, by slapping the tiny fins dozens of times per second.
Seahorses, like other fish, breathe with their gills, control their floating and sinking through the swim bladders, swim very slowly, and use three small fins to push them to swim in the water.
5. Male fish hatching
Hippocampus breeds in a special way, with most hippocampus being "monogamous" during the breeding cycle, with breeding periods generally dating from May to September.
The breeding method is that the female lays the eggs in a nursery bag in the belly of the male fish, which has a bag like a kangaroo's nursery bag. Fertilized eggs develop and hatch in the nursery bag of male fish, during which the main source of nutrition for seahorse embryos is the yolk in male fish, after 7 to 21 days, male fish can hatch seahorse seedlings, each incubation of about 100 to 300 seahorse seedlings.
5 common seahorses:
The seahorse is linear, the spine is smooth and spineless, and the body has white line spots with an irregular distribution of yellow and white.
The spiny hippocampus has small spikes in the spine of the head, and the body is yellowish-white and about 20 cm long.
Three-spotted seahorse with three black spots on the spine.
The sea horse, with a black-brown spine with silver-white spots on its body, is about 30 cm long.
The small seahorse has fine spikes in the spine nodules, and its body is dark brown and about 10 cm long.
The seahorse belongs to the national second-level key protected wild animals, and all species of the seahorse genus are national second-level key protected wild animals. Without the approval of the competent authorities, it is forbidden to illegally sell, purchase or use seahorses and their products.
In view of the economic value of the hippocampus, as early as the 1970s, the mainland and southeast Asian countries began to cultivate the hippocampus artificially. As long as legal breeding and sales procedures are obtained, seahorses can be purchased from regular pharmacies on the market. Seahorse has been regarded as a valuable seafood medicinal material from ancient times to the present, known as "Northern Ginseng, South Sea Horse". Folk people often use seahorse to pot seven soups, soak wine, grind into powder to flush water, etc.