2023-08-25 14:17:49
Los seahorses They are a species threatened by climate change, overfishing and poaching, which trap more than sixty million specimens a year to use them mainly for traditional Asian medicine, CSIC researcher Miquel Planas explained to Efe.
According to Planas, principal investigator in the CSIC’s Ecology and Marine Resources group, it is expected that these animals, with the increase in ocean water temperatures caused by climate change, some species that cannot be found beyond the Netherlands or Great Britain , “Move further north.”
But among its greatest threats, according to the researcher from the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), seahorses or seahorses (Hippocampus) have a series of recipes of traditional Chinese medicine to which a series of health benefits are attributedwhich “sometimes has scientific corroboration and other times not.”
The action of the mafias
The mafias work in areas where there are significant populations of seahorses, such as Peru or southern Portugal, where “they carry out illegal captures of specimens.”
“In Spain, specifically in Malaga, thousands of seahorses have been confiscated from illegal catches that were stuffed and ready to be sent to China for traditional medicine,” he says.
Another danger for this species is the “anthropogenic type” destruction of their habitats, such as areas with macroalgae or marine plants such as posidonia or seagrass. Planas explains that “Every half hour, the equivalent of a football field of these plant communities disappear worldwide.”
In Spain, specifically in Malaga, thousands of illegally caught seahorses have been confiscated
To preserve the species, the NGO Oceánidas promotes the project Save Little Big Seahorsewhich has the advice of Miquel Planas, and aims to conserve existing populations of seahorses in the hands of a Network of Marine Vigilantes, which has more than 2,000 divers.
Andalusia and Galicia
“The Mediterranean is much more susceptible to the appearance of these animals”explains the researcher, and points out that from Oceanids it has been possible to report up to six colonies of seahorses in Andalusia and also in the Galician Atlantic.
However, he stresses, “it is important” to continue investing in research to find out where the seahorses are located, since according to the expert, there are still “not many observations in the Bay of Biscay”, which limits the protection of the species.
According to the entity, currently the seahorse It does not appear in the Spanish catalog of threatened species due to the lack of data and studiesthat collect their situation and the number of specimens of the species, which “in the last fifty years has been seen almost reduced by half”.
In Spain there are two species of seahorse, the ‘Hippocampus hippocampus’ and the ‘Hippocampus guttulatus’
Despite the fact that more than 50 species of seahorses in the world -mostly in areas of the Indian and Pacific oceans-, in Spain there are only two, the Hippocampus hippocampus and the Hippocampus guttulatus.
These species live at shallow depths, normally up to ten metres, on the contrary, he says, “in Australian waters they can be seen up to one hundred metres.”
One of the greatest curiosities that these syngnathids house – the family to which seahorses belong together with pipefish and water dragons – is that “They are the only species where the male takes care of the eggs and embryos.”, they also share the work since “the female begins to produce a new group of eggs when the male still incubates the previous ones”.
EThe seahorse lives between four and five yearsbut their reproduction is limited since the cycles occur between spring and autumn and “they only lay about 350 eggs at a time”, adds the researcher.
Besides, They are the only fish that swim vertically.“have evolved in this way since it makes it easier for them to camouflage in seagrass beds,” explains Planas, adding that they are capable of “camouflaging and hiding from their predators, commonly larger fish.”
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