Joey... NOT JOEL! and... tell me if you see a seahorse!

We just had a visit from three of our past students... Joey, Jimmy and Jon-Michael. I blogged about Joey not that long ago, and he told me that I had his name wrong! I said Joel... Apparently I had his name correct by his photo, but wrong in my ramblings on. So, Sorry Joey.

Anyway... Joey reminded me of another story of when we were diving together. I was conducting the compass excersize with Andrew (I think) while Joey and Sonny were waiting with JP. I would take one, then the next, then the next, testing their use of a compass underwater.


When we surfaced after the dive Sonny was saying how cool the seahorse was (I think it was Sonny). I thought to myself, they must be mistaken. So I said "What seahorse?" He said "The seahorse we saw." So I said "what seahorse? No one showed me the seahorse!" And Sonny said, "well you were busy with the compass episode." I wasn't very happy, as you can imagine. Not only do I love seahorses, but I haven't seen one here yet! They are pretty rare. So three of my students, my lovely attentive students, all saw the seahorse and no one bothered to show me. O thought about failing them all on the spot, but I'm just too nice.


It must have been the Hippocampus zosterae or the dwarf seahorse, as they said it was really little. They live mostly in the eel grass and are super cute! It may have been another type, I didn't see it, so I can't tell! Seahorses are so cool because they are one of the only species in which the male is pregnant. The female actually puts her fertilizes eggs into the "brood pouch" of the males. Also, the female and males (after an extensive courtship ritual) spend the whole mating season together and even though the female has the capability to reproduce with another male while the male is pregnant, she does not. They remain in a monogomous relationship. The female seahorses remain faithful during the pregnancy by returning to the male’s territory each day for an early morning greeting. During the greeting the pair change colors and dance together for about 6 minutes. This greeting plays an important role in reinforcing the strong monogamous bonds between seahorses. Isn't this amazing? I hope that when I am pregnant my husband will dance with me every morning, while changing color, for six minutes...



The lesson to take from this is... if you see something cool, show your instructor / dive guide / buddy, as we all love diving and the best thing about diving is seeing cool things underwater!



It is funny because I had another diver, not a student, but a diver at Turtle Reef one day, and he also saw a seahorse, but didn't tell me... I just have bad luck.

Anyhow, sorry Joey for getting your name wrong, it in no way reflect my feelings about you or any post course bitterness I have over the seahorse incident.

All the information I got about Seahorses, I retrieved from:


Irey, B. and W. Fink. 2004. "Hippocampus zosterae" (On-line), Animal Diversity Web. Accessed February 27, 2009 at http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/site/accounts/information/Hippocampus_zosterae.html.





(Sally wrote this blog ... with the help of Irey and Fink)