gsl

The Seahorse Trust has made a great breakthorough by working with E-bay to ban the sale of real seahorses in the EU and America.

Mike Carson from the Global poicy department of E-bay has, after a request from the trust, said  ”we are aligning our enforcement to reflect the regulations in the EU and US. We are therefore prohibiting the sales of real seahorses on our EU sites and only allowing the sale of these items on the US site with domestic shipping”

http://www.thisisdevon.co.uk/Wildlife-charity-scores-eBay-victory-ongoing/story-17072279-detail/story.html

This is fantastic news and thank you to Mike and E-bay for their prompt action once we alerted them to the problem.

Have a look at this amazing footage from our colleagues at Project Seahorse. The footage is part of a joint investigation between ZSL’s Project Seahorse, Imperial College London, and the University of British Columbia (UBC) into West Africa’s burgeoning seahorse trade. Researcher Kate West was travelling on a local fishing boat off the Atlantic coast when she spotted and filmed seahorses in the wild, and spoke to local fishers about their interaction with the fascinating species.
https://www.zsl.org/conservation/news/first-ever-video-of-elusive-west-african-seahorse,1009,NS.html

SYMPOSIUM ANNOUNCEMENT

The 2nd Syngnathid Biology International Symposium (Syng Bio 2013) will be held at the University of the Algarve (Faro, Portugal) from 25 to 28 March 2013. The Fisheries Biology and Hydrobiology Research Group of the Centre of Marine Sciences has the privilege to host this Symposium and is proud to have it in Portugal.

The symposium theme is “Multidisciplinary Approaches to Syngnathid Biology” and aims to embrace several aspects of seahorse, pipefish and seadragon biology. Oral and poster presentations across a broad range of topics will be considered for presentation, including: physiology, phylogenetics, phylogeography, genomics, sexual selection and mating systems, behaviour, syngnathid breeding programs and aquaculture, and conservation and management.

Please visit the Syng Bio 2013 Web site at www.syngbio.org.

This amazing piece of video was taken by diver Cat Briggs, showing a 6 month old juvenile female Short Snouted Seahorse. This little seahorse would have been born this year in 2012 and is very well hidden amoungst the marine algae. It was not easy to spot her in amongst the rocks and weeds.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLeDNWO8Gz4

The Magic Wand Charity; Merlin Entertainments own charity (Merlin own the SEALIFE Group amongst many others) recently had a stock sale at their head office in Poole in Dorset to raise money for The Seahorse Trust and for Magic Wand.

The sale was a fantastic success and they raised an amazing £300 which will be spilt equally between the trust and Magic Wand

Nicky and the team did a brilliant job and we would like to offer them all our heartfelt thanks for this

Check out the Magic Wand Charity on http://www.merlinsmagicwand.org/

See below pictures of their great sale

PENTAX DIGITAL CAMERA

The National Seahorse Database is now listed on the Joint Nature Conservancy Councils (JNCC) National Biodiversity Database as a contributing Organisation.

The Seahorse Trust runs The British Seahorse Survey and runs The National Seahorse Database.

You can see our listing and learn more about the NBN on http://data.nbn.org.uk/organisation/organisation.jsp?orgKey=10721

SAVE OUR SEAHORSES campaign website

Have a look at the Save Our Seahorses campaign website and sign up to the invite to the Chinese people

http://www.saveourseahorses.org/home.php

Dear all,

check out our website and online petition (under conservation on this site). With our partners in the Save Our Seahorses campaign; we have launched an invite to the people of China to help us sort out the traditional medicine trade.
https://www.theseahorsetrust.org/traditional-medicine-trade.aspx#signup
We are aiming to gather 1 million signatures by the end of 2013, please sign up and send it off to all your social media connections, we need this to go viral with this, so send it far and wide.
Have a look on the Eden Channel tonight (Thursday the 24th of August) for Kealan’s Seahorseman documentary, I am sure you will not hesitate to be shocked by the extent of this trade !!
I strongly feel that we cannot keep telling the the people of the East what to do, so we have opted for this invitation to join forces to make a difference. It will work but we need the global community to sign up to it, so please please send it far and wide and help jus to hit the one million signature mark.

THERE ARE IN EXCESS OF 150 MILLION SEAHORSES SOLD IN THE TRADITIONAL MEDICINE TRADE EVERY YEAR, THIS IS NOT SUSTAINABLE !!

Dried seahorses for sale in China, during the Olympics

Great news ‘The Seahorseman’ a documentary about the traditional medicine trade has been nominated for an award at the Malaysian Film Festival
The documentary features Kealan from Save Our Seahorses and The Seahorse Trust narrated by actor John Hurt and is due to be aired on the 24th of August on the Eden Channel and was filmed and produced by Gillian Marsh from GMTV.
Kealan is filmed as he goes undercover in China, fully exposing the traditional medicine trade which is considerably worse than we thought, using up to 150 million seahorses per year.
Together we are about to launch a campaign called Save Our Seahorses, inviting the people of China to help us to sort this problem out.
The campaign will be run by the Seahorse Alliance; a group of organisations and individuals commited to the preservation of the seahorse.
An 8 minute version of this documentary is currently being shown on 93% of internal flights in China and was kindly put together by our Friends at Widlaid.http://www.wildaid.org/ the documentary can be seen on You Tube on http://youtu.be/F3QnbFTNzgQ