March 2014

Dear all, I would like to share a beautiful piece of film that was taken by our colleagues Gaynor and Marianne who are monitoring areas of the Costa Brava for the SILMAR project. As part of their studies they filmed and photographed these Spiny Seahorses only using ambient light so as to not disturb the seahorses. As you can see the video clearly shows an incredibly relaxed seahorse that is just moving with the wave action. This is a great piece of video as it shows clearly that if seahorses are approached properly and no light is used they remain very calm and relaxed. Kenna Eco Diving is part of the Seahorse Alliance which was set up to bring together like minded projects around the world to study seahorses in their natural environment.
Contact Gaynor and her team for top quality eco diving and thank you to them for sending us this video.
http://www.kennaecodiving.net/eco-escala-guide

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGbqbvU5Rys&feature=em-share_video_user

Just to update everyone on the tagging project at Studland we have changed our approach in the last two years and although it is called a tagging project we no longer use tags.(we will change the name soon) Right from the start we have been refining our techniques and knowledge on how to identify seahorses in the wild (and captivity) and slowly we perfected the photo identification process, which means we no longer have to handle seahorses or put a numbered tag on their necks. We know putting tags on seahorses does them no harm but we wanted to minimise contact with the seahorses to as little as possible. We now photograph the seahorses (without flash as this is illegal) and take pictures of either side of the head. When we get back to the office we look for clusters of patterns in the spots on the head and match them up with our extensive photo database which is part of the National Seahorse database run by The Seahorse Trust. It has taken some time to perfect this technique but we are there and so for the last 2 years we have not used tags at all and relied on the photos.
There is more about this in our 5 Year Report on Studland on this website under downloads at https://www.theseahorsetrust.org/research.aspx

A team of volunteers from Kenna Eco Diving’s Marine Research and Conservation team http://www.kennaecodiving.net/eco-home found two adult Spiny Seahorses (Hippocampus guttulatus) at Cala Montgo in Spain. The team were doing an underwater litter clean up and came across the yellow seahorses. One was female but they could not identify the sex of the other one. Unusually the seahorses were out in the open and the survey team is not sure why; they are usually found in the seagrass beds (Posidonia oceanica) and had probably been disturbed.

These beautiful seahorses are becoming rarer in this area due to many reasons so it was good to find them.

Kenna Diving run projects using eco-diving volunteers and through their projects, they are beginning to understand more about this very fragile habitat and the myriad of species that live in their area.