Coral Stables

Natural History, April, 2001 by Richard Milner

Horses are sometimes confined to corrals, but Bargibant's, or pygmy, seahorses are confined to corals--in fact, to a particular genus of gorgonian coral called Muricella, found in Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and Australia. A relative of the pipefish, this tiny seahorse (Hippocampus bargibanti), when full grown, is the size of a pinky fingernail. It spends its adult life with its tail wrapped around the coral's branches, waiting to ambush tiny crustaceans and larvae that drift near enough to be sucked up. With its numerous pink and red tubercles, the pygmy seahorse blends so perfectly with its host that the species was not discovered until 1970, when a zoologist noticed that several were clinging to a Muricella in an aquarium.

Like most seahorse species, H. bargibanti is monogamous, and couples spend most of their time together. When they mate, they lock together face-to-face, and the female transfers her eggs into the male's abdominal pouch. Within a few weeks, the male grows visibly pregnant. (This pair, with pregnant father at fight, was photographed at a depth of 140 feet, off the coast of Indonesia's Komodo Island.) The embryos hatch in his pouch and are brooded there. While male seahorses of larger species may brood as many as a thousand embryos in their pouches, the male pygmy seahorse carries only one or two. As soon as they are expelled from the pouch, the young are on their own.