Seahorses are the only fish on Earth who have a neck. Their closest relative is a fish-needle.
These marine inhabitants have a very tenacious tail, which they can bark the perch and thus move around. Seahorses differ from other inhabitants of the seas and oceans in that they float in an upright position and in pairs, often tied their tails.
The eyes of sea horses are able to move independently of each other.
In order to eat, they use a stigma, which acts like a vacuum cleaner – sucks plankton. Seahorses do not have teeth, and even stomach. These fish are forced to eat constantly.
Seahorses have an excellent talent for camouflage, their scales can become “invisible” – merge with the environment.
Sea horses have a matriarchy, because females choose their partner. Sea horses perform marital dances, where, for several days the female and male rise to the surface of the water and again sink to the bottom in an amazing dance. If the male does not maintain the set tempo, the female finds herself another partner.
Sea horses choose a partner once and for all life.
The eggs are hatched by the male, the female lays them in a special bag on his stomach. There, within 1.5 months, future horses grow, and then appear through the hole. One male can produce at a time from 5 to 1,5 thousand fry. It is impossible to call males pregnant in the full sense – as fry does not originate in their body.
32 species of these fishes are known in total. Active human activity led to their mass extinction, so 30 kinds of sea horses were listed in the Red Book.
In oriental medicine, seahorses are often used to prepare medicines for asthma and skin diseases. The habitats of seahorses are polluted or completely destroyed by humans, and the plankton they feed on is eaten by jellyfish.
Dishes from sea horses are a real delicacy. The most expensive restaurants in the world serve dishes with liver and seahorses eyes, and in China they prefer to fry them in oil.
However, in wildlife almost no one eats sea horses, except by accident. The thing is that they almost completely consist of bones, thorns and scales.
Sea horses live on Earth for 40 million years. From the extinction of sea horses, good fertility saves.
Seahorse – is “slow-moving” fish, since if can not swim like an ordinary fish. They move vertically, slowly moving the fins on the chest and back. The slowest representative of this species of fish moves at a speed of 1.5 meters per hour.
Depending on the species, the sizes of these fish reach from 2 to 35 centimeters. The total life expectancy is 5 years.
In the period of severe storms, these fish are kept by the tail at algae. Unfortunately, some kind of them are not adapted to this and so during a storm they often end up on land, where they perish.
These creatures are so tender that they are difficult to breed in captivity. If they lose their couple, they are very bored, until death.