Dear lucycat:
Howdy, Lucy! Welcome aboard!
It’s great to have a successful breeder on the forum, and if you are able to raise the very challenging Hippocampus reidi fry consistently, I’m sure we can all learn a lot from your methods.
Long renowned for their bright color phases, prolific breeding habits, and huge broods of difficult-to-raise fry, Brazilian seahorses (H. reidi) are one of my personal favorites. They are famous among seahorse keepers for two things: brilliant colors and making babies. The Brazilian breeding machine is the most prolific of all the seahorses. They have a well-deserved reputation for churning out brood after brood every two weeks with relentless regularity, and hold the world record for delivering ~1600 young in a single brood But with that many fetal fry crammed into one incubator pouch, the inevitable tradeoff is that the young are born at a considerably smaller size than most seahorses. They also go through a lengthy pelagic phase, drifting freely with the plankton for up to 1-2 months, which makes H. reidi fry notoriously difficult to raise. So you have done very well indeed to have 20 H. reidi juveniles between the ages of 2 weeks and 20 weeks old. Keep up the great work!
If you contact me off list, Lucy, I will be happy to send you detailed species summaries for H. reidi and H. barbouri that discuss successful rearing protocols that have been developed for these species on this side of the pond.
In the meantime, please feel free to read through the posts and add your thoughts and comments as you wish. You can search through the archives for information on any particular topic that may be of interest.
Best wishes with all your fishes, Lucy!
Happy Trails!
Pete Giwojna
Ocean Rider, Inc. is an Organic Hawaiian-Based Seahorse Aqua-Farm & Aquarium that Follows Strict Good Farming Practices in Raising Seahorses and Other Aquatic Life.
