Sea Horses

There are many species of sea horses available for the aquarium hobby; they can be found in a variety of habitats. From temperate to tropical environments in bays and estuaries living in sea grass meadows or in sponge gardens and on coral reefs to far offshore in deep water habitats.

Consider the original habitat of the species when selecting them for aquarium life and provide a similar type environment.. Tropical horses wont tolerate cold water well and similarly cold water horses cant cope with high temperatures.

Careful consideration and planning needs to be done before purchasing either sea horses or the aquarium intended to house them.

We have encountered many hobbyists who have had disastrous attempts at keeping sea horses. Often this has been through bad advice from aquarium shops with little understanding of marine aquarium husbandry. We suggest you do not buy sea horses or set-ups from pet shops that do not specialize in marines. There are four main points to consider:

Don’t be put off by their “difficult reputation” aquacultured sea horses are more hardy than most give them credit for, in fact tougher and easier to keep than many of the popular marine aquarium fishes. They are quite adapt at living in an aquarium with a small home range provided the basics for all successful marine aquaria are met. The difficult to keep reputation has been derived by the keeping of wild horses and use of less than adequate marine aquariums.

There are both tropical and temperate sea horse species available distributions of the various species do some times over lap. In general most tropical horses can tolerate temperatures up to 28C, but ideally should be kept within the range of 23–25C, Subtropical horses: 20-23C and Temperate 18-20C. You should research the individual species requirements that you intend to keep. Chillers are required in most parts of Australia to maintain anything other than tropical species.

Often advice offered is to limit water flow, good water flow is important to create gas exchange in marine aquariums and to allow natural filtration processes to operate effectively. Our advice is to avoid strong laminar water flows that may catch horses unawares but to provide moderate water flow throughout. A “Tunzie, nano stream” style pump of 4500ltr/hr would suit a sea horse tank of 200liters nicely.

Provide hitching posts for the sea horses to wrap their tails onto. Branching rocks and live algae’s work well.

Keep peppermint shrimp with your sea hoses for aptisa anemone control. These problematic anemones will create lesions that can lead to infections in sea horses, fortunately for us peppermint shrimp love to eat the anemones.

Frozen mysis shrimp should be the main stay of the diet, these can be enriched a few time per week by a few drips of liquid vitamins (Sera fishtamin). Additionally a few times per week you can sprinkle on dried micro algae (Spirinula, Asthaxin). For an occasional change you can feed frozen Brine shrimp (Artema) there is little nutritional value in brine shrimp unless these are enriched so choose a quality brand. Feeding should be conducted twice daily in small feeds the horses can finish up in a few minutes.

Adding a refugium to the sump with coarse sand / gravel, live rock and macro algae’s and establishing breeding populations of small mysids and pods will generate natural live feeds within in the aquarium enhancing the horses health and environment greatly.

Tank raised specimens are readily available commercially. Reputedly some species are much easier than others to culture.

Hobbyists breeding sea horses at home have patchy results in the main in comparison to the wide spread success with animals like clown fishes.

When keeping male-female pairs it is almost inevitable batches of young will follow. To avoid this you can keep single sexes within species if you wish.

The males and females practice courting dances often with the male inflating his pouch while their tails entwine. This will result in the female passing her eggs to the males pouch. He is left to incubate and hatch the young. He releases tiny miniature horses live direct from the pouch.

The horses can be raised on Artema or on specific species of copepods as a first feed. A lot of detailed information is available these days on the culture of horses. We recommend some careful research and detailed planning before any attempt be made to ensure a reasonable chance of success.

Disease.

There are a number of diseases and treatment methods particular to sea horses. A great deal of information is required to correctly identify and treat disease efficiently. It is best for us not to provide limited information that may mislead, in the scope of this care sheet. Rather we direct you to an excellent source of more detailed information on both breeding and disease.