Riding to the Seahorse's Rescue - biologist Amanda Vincent

International Wildlife, March, 1999

Biologist Amanda Vincent wrote the book on equines of the deep. Now she's trying to save them.

Marine biologist Amanda Vincent sits on the steps of a thatched-roof house in Handumon, a small coastal village on the Philippine island of Getafe. She scrutinizes a wooden cribbage board carved into the shape of a seahorse.

"There's a problem with this one," she says in Cebuano, a Philippine tongue, pointing out some misshapen holes.

Felisa Cerida, an island resident, has brought 14 cribbage boards and six wooden boats, all shaped like seahorses, to Vincent for inspection. As part of a seahorse conservation project in the Philippines, the biologist and her Filipino staff are helping villagers export the handicrafts to the United States.

Before Vincent's team launched the exporting project last year, Cerida's extended family--like most in this village--relied mainly on fishing for income. They would snatch hundreds of seahorses from local waters each month, selling them to middlemen for the traditional Chinese medicine, aquarium or souvenir trade. Now they hope to earn enough from handicrafts that they can spend fewer nights fishing, reducing stress on the seahorses while boosting family income. "I thank the Lord I can do this," says Cerida, who has seven children.

The exchange marks another in a string of small victories engineered by Vincent, 38, an energetic and forceful Canadian, on behalf of a beguiling but beleaguered group of fishes that resemble miniature horses. With such work here and around the globe, she has almost single- handedly put seahorses on the radar screens of the world's scientific and conservation communities.

An assistant professor of conservation biology at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, Vincent first conducted groundbreaking research on these colorful and surprising fish in the Pacific and the Caribbean. Then she turned her attention to saving them. This effort takes Vincent to far-flung locations such as Handumon, where she oversees a complex conservation effort that includes teaching grade-schoolers to appreciate seahorses, working with local officials to regulate fishing, helping villagers develop a handicraft industry and encouraging fishermen not to overfish.

"She is very unusual in being able to carry out scientific studies that are effective at raising awareness locally and globally, and at the same time identifying practical solutions and conservation measures," says Georgina M. Mace, a senior fellow at the Institute of Zoology in London.

Vincent came to her seahorse work in a roundabout fashion. After earning a degree in zoology from the University of Western Ontario in 1981, she traveled the world for three years, gaining an interest in marine conservation. In graduate school at Cambridge University, in England, she chose to study the reproductive ecology of the seahorse, in part to explore what male pregnancy in seahorses (the group's most distinctive trait) meant for other differences between the sexes. She learned that seahorses had a rich mythical history and were featured on Greek and Roman pottery. But from a scientific view, the fish seemed to have dropped off the map.

"It came as a bit of a surprise to discover the most recent papers on seahorses had basically been written 35 to 40 years before, and that none of them had been focused toward modern theoretical thinking in biology," said Vincent. "A lot of my notions for a very precise theoretical investigation had to go by the wayside until we laid down basic biological parameters."

To get those basic biological data, Vincent studied captive seahorses at Cambridge, and later did a year of field work in Australia. There she spent as much as nine hours a day underwater observing the fish. Although her research was sometimes tedious, she uncovered new information about seahorses' sexual habits. Researchers previously knew that females deposit their eggs into the male's pouch, which is then sealed, and that the male is pregnant for several weeks, endures labor and gives birth. But Vincent discovered that seahorse pairs were faithful to each other for life.

"Sticking with a partner is pretty common in the animal world, but most partners cheat on each other all the time," she says. "Seahorses don't as far as we know."

There are about 32 different species of seahorses around the world, living in temperate and tropical coastal areas from Florida to the Philippines. The fish, which vary in size from about half an inch to a foot, can consume thousands of tiny marine organisms each day, swallowing them whole through their horselike snouts.

The creature's equine structure, useful for floating in grassy coastal areas and sucking up food, is what fascinates many people about the seahorse. Its head has a crown nearly as distinctive as a human fingerprint. It also has a prehensile tail that allows it to grip objects while floating vertically in the ocean.

Seahorses have an external skeleton that acts like armor to repel marine predators. Some crabs prey on seahorses, and large fish will periodically eat them, but Vincent learned that people are the greatest threat to the animal. This motivated her to move from research to conservation when she obtained her Ph.D. from Cambridge in 1990.