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  3. Richard Ⅲ once offered his kingdom for a horse. Today, a handful of dedicated naturalists are giving time, money and even the oc

Richard Ⅲ once offered his kingdom for a horse. Today, a handful of dedicated naturalists are giving time, money and even the oc

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问题     Richard Ⅲ once offered his kingdom for a horse. Today, a handful of dedicated naturalists are giving time, money and even the occasional home mortgage to help preserve a different kind of horse—the seahorse. The captivating little creatures of legend and myth are fish despite their name, but are unique in nature. Among other things that make them special is the fact that it is the male of the species that becomes pregnant, endures labor and gives birth to the young.
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    The biggest threat, she says, comes from traditional Asian medicine. Seahorses figure in Korean Hanyak, Japanese Kanpo and Indonesian Jamu medicine, as well as in folk healing in the Philip pines. In Chinese communities worldwide, potions made from the little fish are used to treat many conditions, including asthma, impotence, infertility, lethargy, exhaustion, baldness, rabies, gas pains, throat infections and skin diseases. In traditional prescriptions, seahorses often are ground to a powder, which is applied directly to wounds or mixed with water or alcohol and then drank. Sometimes they are placed whole in alcohol or in a liquid medicine. More and more, though, seahorses are appearing in commercially produced pills. They are also used in "tonic foods", soups and other dishes considered semi-medicinal, like orange juice or chicken soup in the West. The result is a global trade exceeding 20 million fish a year and involving nearly 40 countries and regions. Of the approximately 35 seahorse types found around the world, Vincent says, "every single species is being exploited". How then to save the seahorse?
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    She favors an approach in which "fishers don’t lose, but the seahorses gain". A philosophy reflected in the locally-run conservation projects she has set up in Asia. Vincent coordinates a seahorse culturing program in Nha Trang, Vietnam, that is designed to decrease pressure on wild populations, and another in the fishing village of Handumon in the central Philippines, where some underwater "ranching" has begun. Handumon villagers have created a sanctuary and patrol it against poachers; they wait for pregnant male seahorses to give birth before they are caught and sold. The offspring are thus available to repeat the cycle. "We want there to be enough seahorses so that you can fish off a few without losing the entire species", Vincent says.
    "Captive breeding has got to be the way forward", says Garrick-Maidment, who in the spring of 1995 opened his aquarium in an old wharf building on the River Exe in Exeter, 275 km southwest of London. There, he has seen the birth of Hippocampus ramulosus seahorses, one of the two species that were found in European waters. Captive breeding, however, is difficult for commercial zoos and aquariums as well as for private collectors and hobbyists. Seahorses are finicky about their environment, prone to illness and can die in a matter of months. A critical factor is nutrition: their digestive system demand live food—and lots of it. Such breeding, which also requires precise scientific record-keeping, has met with limited success in some aquariums and zoos, notably in Berlin, Stuttgart and Amsterdam.
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    The use of such remedies appears to be growing in the West, too, with increased interest in natural healing. How well these nostrums actually work and whether other ingredients could be substituted for seahorses have yet to be explored. Paul Pui-Hay, professor of the Department of Biology and the Chinese Medicinal Material Research Center at the Chinese University of Hong Kong studies endangered animals used in traditional medicine. It is important, he says, to find the balance between medical requirements and the need for wildlife protection. "With our joint efforts", he believes, "we would find a win-win situation" in which both threatened animals and sick humans could be saved.
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    For creatures in such high demand, surprisingly little is known about seahorses. They have existed an estimated 40 million years and were credited with curative properties by Greek and Roman writers, as far back as 342 B.C. The animals range in size from the 10- to 20-mm H. minotaur recently discovered in Australia to the 300-mm H. igneus found in the Pacific. They are able to change color, chameleon-like, and to grow appendages to blend in with their surroundings.
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    The male pregnancy brings a smile to the scientist’s face. This strange biological behavior, Vincent says, appeals to her both as a scientist who started out studying sex differences, and "as a feminist". It also, she notes, stirs smiles among the Handumon fishermen’s wives, who are struggling to bring up their many children. Garrick-Maidment surmises that the male pregnancy is a form of burden-sharing, and he expresses a real affection for his brood of several hundred adults and their offspring". They all seem to have characters", he smiles. "They’re very individualistic, very unfishlike".
    These most unfishlike of fish are found all over the world in shallow waters around the Americas, Europe, the Persian Gulf countries, Africa, Asia and Australia. Only in Tasmania is it illegal to catch and sell seahorses without a permit. Even there enforcement is difficult. Says Rod Connolly, a marine ecologist at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia: "The Asian waters either are being depleted or will shortly be depleted, so Australia...will be easy pickings". With no accurate count of seahorse numbers, no one yet knows if there will come a time when scientists will call for limits on trade—or an outright ban on seahorse fishing.

A. "There cannot be any single, prescribed answer", Vincent argues. Though seahorses are under siege, "they are not yet on the verge of extinction", so any ban on their fishing now would harm traditional livelihoods, and would be, she says, "pure and simple cultural imperialism".
B. Their special qualities have made seahorses highly sought after—for everything from adorning exotic aquariums to providing ingredients for aphrodisiacs. The resulting pressure on their populations and habitats has, in turn, attracted attention from enthusiasts such as Neil Garrick-Maidment, a naturalist with a background in animal management. Garrick-Maidment obtained a second mortgage on his house to open the Seahorse Nature Aquarium in Exeter, England, Europe’s only specially built seahorse research and conservation aquarium. And Amanda Vincent, an assistant professor of conservation biology at McGill University in Montreal, has spent thousands of hours underwater, studying seahorse behavior, qualifying her as the world’s leading expert on the animals. On land, she has investigated the lucrative trade that has made them universally vulnerable. What she has found is that everywhere from the British Isles to Tasmania seahorses are wanted—dead or alive.
C. For the time being, Vincent and her colleagues forge ahead on other fronts, including Project Seahorse, set up through the London Zoological Society to raise funds for—and awareness of—seahorse conservation.
D. From their equine heads to their prehensile tails—which enable them to grip on to seaweed, coral and other objects—seahorses are unique among undersea creatures. Their dawn courtship rituals are long and colorful, often taking three mornings. The female visits the male’s territory and, gripping the same bit of sea grass or coral, they circle around as if on a miniature merry-go-round. When they are ready to mate, they rise together through the water, face to face.
E. To preserve seahorses in the wild, activists have begun to work with traditional medical practitioners. Judy Mills, East Asia director TRAFFC (Trade Records Analysis of Flora and Fauna in Commerce), a monitoring group of the World Wild Fund for Nature and the World Conservation Union, met recently in Hong Kong with 500 practitioners to warn that "if we lose seahorses in the wild, they lose them from their pharmacopeia, One billion or more of the world’s people depend in some respect on traditional Chinese medicine".
F. Seahorses are caught mainly by subsistence fishing communities in Thailand, India, the Philippines and Vietnam, and often are the catchers’ only source of income. As the fish live in relatively shallow water—in sea grass, mangroves and coral reefs—they are easy to catch and are often scooped up with other fish. Figures are inexact, but Vincent believes global demand is growing by up to 10% a year. In Hong Kong, a hub of the trade, seahorses are more valuable, by weight, than silver. The most desired specimen are "pale, large and smooth", according to Vincent, and can fetch $1200 per kg. But the huge demand for their medicinal use often means that immature seahorses and others considered of poor quality also are taken because even they can command $300 to $400 per kg. When the young are captured, killed and sold, the total population ultimately shrinks.

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