Strange Fish

Back in March, I found a perfectly preserved northern pipefish on the coast of Brooklyn. When I found it, I didn’t know what it was, but I thought it looked like a straightened seahorse. It turns out that seahorses and pipefish are related, in the Syngnathidae family along with the seadragons. I’ve never seen a seahorse, alive or dead, in the wild, but the Lined seahorse, Hippocampus erectus, is native to our region. It’s one of about three dozen species found world-wide.

Since then, I’ve been reading Helen Scales’ Poseidon’s Steed, about seahorses. Fascinating creatures, much mythologized, but real. They are actually fish, and they are unique in that the males give birth. Females impregnate the males with eggs; males launch their milt into the water, suck it back in, and then hold the now fertilized eggs through development until laborious birth. We didn’t know this until fairly recently, so that can’t be the reason seahorses are used in traditional Chinese medicine, typically to pep up the ol’ pecker. Like ivory, horn, seal genitals, and other exotic parts, seahorses are enlisted in the battery of pseudoscience against the male human’s bete noir, impotence. Even when these powders are shown to be tainted with lead – nothing like some toxic metal in your whang to impress the ladies – the lust for them does not cease (the little blue pill hasn’t softened the demand for these species, unfortunately), indeed it increases as the combined forces of rarity and greater demand grind together.

But you shouldn’t think that’s the only thing endangering the seahorses. Oh, no, the desires of the Great Devourer are much stronger than that: for instance, the shrimp industry scraps the seafloor, destroying habitat and everything in the nets’ deadly way. And then there’s global warming, which is both warming the water and making it more acidic. Warmer water, in the best-case scenario, means that those species who can move will. But acidification, caused by the ocean’s absorption of carbon dioxide, dissolves calcium carbonate, the building block of much of ocean life. Grim tidings… but unlike National Geographic, which seems to end every article on a note of uplift, probably so as not to upset their advertisers, that’s all I’ve got, damn it.