Fascinating seahorses a reflection of many animals

By AMANDA STRINDBERG
It was the nod that changed his life.

Crawling on all fours, Bruce Watts made his more-than-hourly check on his baby. This time was different.

With his face nearly pressed against the aquarium glass, the yellow seahorse drifted closer. Their eyes met. Barbie reared his head in recognition of his keeper.


"That sealed the deal," said the Idyllwild resident. "I knew I was going to pursue this. Typically fish aren't that interactive of pets. But that was a special thing. It was as if he was saying, 'Hey dude.' "

The hours of nursing the sick and finicky creature instantly became worth it.

And from that simple gesture a passion was born that would later lead to a life of breeding and raising hundreds of the enchanting marine fish.

"I'm a parent to seahorses," said Watts, 57, sitting in his Idyllwild home rimmed with seahorse-filled aquariums, his own little sea world in the midst of mountains and pines.

Spending a portion of his childhood growing up on Oahu, Watts was fascinated by marine life at an early age. At 8 years old, he was collecting guppies and swordtails on family outings to a nearby stream.

A few fish bowls quickly ballooned into multiple tanks. Free time was spent watching colorful creatures at a local fish store or taking care of his aquatic pets. A tank here. A fish there. Watts began to breed the fish and sell them to local stores.

The money, of course, was put back into his tanks.

The hobby stuck.

As an adult, Watts had a room dedicated to his fish. But a breakup led him to put the tanks in storage when he downsized to a smaller pad.

But it wasn't long before Watts was back at it. Life just wasn't the same without his swimming companions. But the fish enthusiast wanted a new challenge. He began to focus on saltwater fish.

Seahorse Fanatic

Then he met Barbie and everything changed.

It was April 2003 and Watts was paying a regular visit to Zen Aquatics in Palm Desert, an aquarium store. On the counter in a small aquarium was a sickly seahorse that hadn't eaten in more than a week.

The owner begged Watts to adopt him, confident he could give him a chance at survival. Watts couldn't resist the animal's cute white-striped snout and yellowish coloring. But this wasn't a typical first seahorse. Barbie was a wild-caught barbouri seahorse. Wild-caught seahorses are more difficult to raise than captive-bred seahorses because they only eat live food and have been exposed to numerous diseases.

But Watts poured his heart and money into the creature, spending $100 a month on live shrimp imported from a Nevada shrimp farm, the only food he could get the picky seahorse to slurp into his snout.

"It was a challenge," Watts said. "But I loved it. These fish were exotic, beautiful and interesting."

Their monkeylike prehensile tail, horselike head, anteaterlike snout, kangaroolike pouch, flirty personalities and chameleon color changes made for endless hours of seahorse gazing.

The fascination only grew. Watts purchased more and more of the marine animals, joined chat rooms dedicated to raising seahorses, and read up on endless books and articles published about the vertical fish.

Raising the babies quickly crescendoed into a full-time job in addition to his day job an adventure-store manager. But Watts was good at it. Few can say that, said Dan Underwood, president of Seahorse Source, a Florida-based aquaculture facility that breeds seahorses.

"There's a lot of people out there trying to do it, but not many people succeed," Underwood said. "It's very time-consuming and laborious. Only a handful of hobbyists nationally are as successful as Bruce is."

Watts sells his marine horses for about $50 each, sending about 100 fish across the country each year. But not to just anyone.

"I'm not a businessman -- I'm a hobbyist," he said. "These are my babies and I want to make sure they have good homes."

High-Maintenance Fish

Jennifer Setterstrom, owner of Coral Sea Tropical Fish in Riverside, said interest is high in the seahorses until people find out how much work they entail.

"Raising the babies can be harder than taking care of a newborn," she said.

But for some the animal's fascinating features are worth it.



"They are magical," said Perry Hampton, director of animal husbandry at Long Beach's Aquarium of the Pacific, where the seahorses are one of the most popular exhibits. "They are cute and appealing and you won't find anything else like them."

For one, the fish is the only vertebrate animal to have a true male pregnancy. The fathers carry the developing young in a bulging pouch. When the seahorse is ready to give birth, he pumps up and down, releasing squirts of the babies, which can range from 25 to hundreds of the fish, perfect miniature replicas of an adult seahorse.

Almost immediately they need to eat live food. Watts sucks them up with a turkey baster and then squeezes the infants into a nursery tank filled with brine shrimp, which he hatches for the youngsters.

Then there's the constant water changes and the weekly trips down the twisting mountain road to Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla for fresh seawater -- five hours round trip.

"My babies do better in all-natural sea water," Watts said. "It's their natural environment."

Oh and there's the burping. As the seahorses mature, the males can get air bubbles stuck in their pouch, causing them to rise to the surface. When this happens Watts has to coax their pouch open with a bobby pin and massage the air bubbles out.

Watts also weans the young onto frozen food and must constantly observe the fish. The little ones are sensitive, with about a 30 percent survival rate, Watts said.

"You have to be tough-skinned to do this," he said. "If anything goes wrong you can lose the whole brood. It's a full-time job to raise them. My social life is the seahorse chat room."

But the rewards are great. The hours spent staring at the fish as they play, tangling their tails like pretzels, watching the animals pirouette through the water in a flirtatious morning dance, part of the courtship process, and knowing that you helped raise an animal that is considered threatened in some areas, collected for both the aquarium trade and Chinese medicine purposes.

"I feel privileged to have them in my house," Watts said, gazing at six of his fish wrapped around a fake coral plant.

But of the hundreds of seahorses that Watts has cared for, none will replace Barbie, his first seahorse. He may have only lived four months, plagued with various diseases, but he ignited a lifelong passion. Occasionally, Watts will stare at photos of the animal that changed his life.

"He'll always be special to me," he said. "He got me started. It was a crushing blow when he died, but he made me want to breed them so that other seahorses wouldn't have to be taken from the ocean to have as pets."

Reference:pe