Seahorses in the Home Aquarium

Seven Tips for Successful Keeping of Hippocampus

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Oct 9, 2008 Sarah Goodwin-Nguyen

These beautiful, gentle creatures are extremely sensitive and difficult to maintain. Here's seven helpful hints for first-time "pony" keepers.

Seahorses are lovely and fascinating. They become friendly in the home aquarium, swimming up to greet their keepers, even wrapping their prehensile tails gently around a finger or wrist. However, they require specialized care and should only be attempted by experienced saltwater aquarists. The following seven tips will help ensure success for novice pony parents.

  1. Choose Captive-Bred Seahorses Over Wild-Caught: Tank-bred seahorses will be less stressed by contact with humans and better adapted to the typical water conditions of the home aquarium. They are more likely to accept frozen foods or brine shrimp, which are not their natural foods. Wild-caught seahorses often carry diseases or parasites. Also, taking seahorses from the wild is not environmentally responsible. Wild seahorse populations are diminishing. Their seagrass, mangrove, and coral reef habitats are being destroyed by human encroachment. Seahorses are seriously overfished for use in home aquariums, sold as a remedy in traditional Chinese medicine, used as a food source, and dried out and sold as “souvenirs.”
  2. Keep the Aquarium for Seahorses Only: Seahorses are not fast swimmers and may not be able to compete for food with fish. Also, they have no defense mechanisms for dealing with aggressive or predatorial tankmakes. Pipefish, a close relative of the seahorse with a similar diet, can be kept in the tank. A “cleaner crew” of snails, shrimp, and starfish is also fine, but most crabs (except small hermits) should be avoided.
  3. Choose a Tank With Height: Depending on the size of the species of Hippocampus you keep, tank size can vary. A quartet of the very smallest (zosterae) can be housed in a 10-gallon; larger species need 60 or more gallons to thrive. In general, they need more depth (height) than width. This is even more important if you plan to breed your ponies, as they need vertical swimming space for courtship and fertilization.
  4. Maintain Perfect Water Parameters: The tank should be well-cycled and at least somewhat mature before adding seahorses. These animals are very sensitive to nitrates and nitrites. PH, salinity and alkalinity should be at optimal levels for seawater. Temperature must be adjusted for the species of pony you plan to keep, depending on if they are from tropical, subtropical, or temperate waters.
  5. Feed Plenty of Live Food: Seahorses have tiny stomachs and should be fed small amounts a few times daily. In order to reduce nitrates and phosphates in the tank, some of these meals should be live. Brine shrimp alone is not an adequate diet. The ideal food is an assortment of sargassum shrimp, grammarus, amphipods, isopods, etc.. Unless you live close enough to the ocean to harvest these foods daily, you will need a separate tank or refugium to cultivate live foods. Frozen mysis are well-received and easily procured, but should not make up the animal's entire diet.
  6. Avoid Contamination: Seahorses are sensitive to contaminates in their water. If you are a smoker, you need to be especially diligent about washing your hands and arms before working in the tank: nicotine is toxic to your ponies. Avoid smoking or using bleach, Windex, etc., near the seahorse tank.
  7. Give Them Places to "Hitch:" Decorate their underwater world with branching coral (real or fake) and long, sturdy seagrass (real or fake.) They will wrap their tales around these fixtures during periods of rest and to ambush food.

For more in-depth information, or to attempt more advanced aquaria involving Hippocampus, check out Seahorse.org.

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The copyright of the article Seahorses in the Home Aquarium in Saltwater Fish is owned by Sarah Goodwin-Nguyen. Permission to republish Seahorses in the Home Aquarium in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
A 120-Gallon Seahorse Tank at Key West Aquarium, Sarah Goodwin-Nguyen A 120-Gallon Seahorse Tank at Key West Aquarium
hippocampus erectus, Sarah Goodwin-Nguyen hippocampus erectus
 
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