The Super Spectacular Seahorse
Macey Moser
Introduction
A male seahorse starts to wiggle and squirm. Hundreds to thousands of baby seahorses come swimming out of an opening on the male's belly. This is an important part of the seahorse's life cycle. The seahorse is an extraordinary marine animal that has a unique diet, life cycle, and body structure. This outstanding organism has many amazing qualities that make it its own.
Delicious Diet
This delicate creature has a very interesting diet. This die consists of shrimp, brine, tiny specimens of fish, plankton and algae, making this fish an omnivore. The seahorse also sucks up other organisms with using its tube like snout. Its hard to believe that the seahorse does not have a stomach! Because of this, these gentle creatures have to be constantly eating different species of crustacea, algae, and other sources of food, otherwise, the animal would die. But the seahorse has to obtain its food somehow! The organism sucks up its food using its long snout. Sometimes, if the prey is a little larger than the snout itself, the seahorse's nose will expand! After the peaceful organism catches its prey, it will make a clicking sound while eating. Did you know that seahorses suck up their prey instead of chewing it because they have no teeth? Well, even baby seahorses suck up their prey, or three-thousand to four-thousand tiny food items a day. As you can see, for these reasons, seahorses of all shapes, sizes, genders, and ages have an interesting and unique diet.
Lovley Life Cycle
The seahorse has an extraordinary life cycle with many quirky qualities. Reproduction first starts for this outstanding organism during the Predawn dance, which is when the two mates dance, copy each others movements, spin around with linked tails, wrap their tails around a piece of sea grass or coral, and differ their colors. Afterwards, the seahorses do the True Courtship dance, when both male and female rise up together, snout to snout, and the male presents his brood pouch to the female by puffing it up with water to show that the eggs are ready to be received. Then, the male expels his sperm in the water near and around himself, and it is absorbed by the pouch, which fertilizes the eggs. About three weeks later, the little one hundred to one-thousand eggs are hatched into little versions of adult seahorses. This awesome organism produces, as I said before, one hundred to one-thousand eggs, although one half or less survive. Believe it or not, they all have to fend for themselves, because the opening to the pouch is too small for them. Each baby is about one inch long, although different species give birth to larger or smaller seahorses, can have different amounts of eggs, and different amounts of offspring. Can you believe that when the female gives her eggs to the male, she becomes smaller and the male grows bigger? Which is interesting because, males prefer larger females to mate with. This marine animal, for these reasons, has an extraordinary life cycle with many quirky qualities.
Awesome Appearance
This beautifully awkward fish called the seahorse, has an extremely different appearance body structure. The organism's length ranges anywhere between 1.6 centimeters to thirty-five centimeters and has an average height of ten centimeters. To help you visualize the seahorse to its maximum length, you could picture a seahorse about the size of a ruler. But, the size of a seahorse usually depends on the species. The beautiful creature is fabulous for many reasons, one of those reasons being that males have a brood pouch, to carry eggs that the female lays. Another interesting feature would be their pipe like snouts, they are used to suck up food like a vaccum cleaner! They have these snouts because they do not have any teeth! Can you believe that even though a seahorse is considered a fish, that it has no scales? Instead, the seahorse has a skeletal system contained with small plates that are covered in a thin layer of skin. These amazing creatures also possess a long tail, which is used to grab on to underwater plants, and separately moving eyes (like a chameleon's) that make it easy to spot out predators and prey. This great organism has many color combinations and have two patterns, stripes and spots, the only patterns that a seahorse possesses! They come in brown, black, yellow, green, blue, and probably more according to different species. These different colors and patterns help the seahorse blend in or camouflage into its natural habitat ( its only defense against predators). As you can see, seahorse’s have an extremely unique appearance and body structure.
Conclusion
A flash of brown darts behind a curtain of seaweed, hoping to not be spotted by one of its predators, the crab. The enemy snaps his mighty claws, hoping to snag the sneaky seahorse as a meal. Fortunately for the seahorse, it blends in so well with the seaweed, and rocks that it is undetectable! The seahorse is a magnificent specimen of the water and sea, and as an amazing diet, an extraordinary body structure, and a unique life cycle. Making this fish dolphinately stand out from the other fish in the sea ( I’m not even squidding).