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Dear all, I think this card from Lila sums it all up, inside it says Merry Christmas and a Seahorse Saving New Year.

Thank you Lila and the same to you and your family and all our amazing supporters.

Every year we grow from strength to strength and thank you so much for all your hard work.

Happy Christmas and have a brilliant New Year

Seahorses around the world are little understood but Robbie and his team from Manly Sealife Centre in Sydney Harbour have launched a seahorse survey in partnership with the trust to try and find out more about them. Robbie and the team have done a couple of dives now and found some Hippocampus whitei and they know there are several other species in the area. Diving in the area is interesting as they have to dive around the shark nets, so they keep one eye out for seahorses and one for sharks makes for a very interesting dive !!! We hope to expand the seahorse surveys out to all Sealife Centres around the world in 2014, so that we can build a world knowledge on the species, its behaviour and distribution.

The only way forward in understanding about seahorses is to form partnerships around the world and our ongoing partnership with the Sea Life Group is vital to our research and knowledge but Sealife and its amazing staff and visitors bring more to this as well. We have been nominated for the second year running as the Seahorse charity that sealife is raising funds for in Europe. The collection vortexes in each of the European Sealife Centres have been dedicated to the trust, so every penny put into these vortexes comes to the trust to help fund our work. I would like to publically thank the Sealife group and their visitors for their amazing support, without them we could not do so much. So next time your in a sealife Centre please drop a penny into their vortexes and support the work we are all doing together.

Here at the trust we are so lucky to have the support of so many people and organisations, not only supporting our goals and research work but also in raising funds for us. The National Marine Aquarium in Plymouth is one such organisation who have kindly raised almost £1,000 for our work from their guests this year and we would like to thank them for all their hard work.
http://www.national-aquarium.co.uk/

Our in country partners MCC in Cambodia have set up new research facilities to help the threatened population of seahorses in Cambodia and they unique opportunities for volunteers on their projects. Have a look at the website below and see what is new and what is happening in Cambodia.

http://www.marineconservationcambodia.org/

The project in Malta has really developed now and we have a joint partnership between ourselves, the PDSA and Nature Trust Malta. We have 2 coordinators on the islands, Neville on Malta and Donna on Gozo, who represent the PDSA, so that they can report in and spread the word about the seahorses. Donna has also kindly offered to represent The Seahorse Trust on the islands and her e-mail is malta@localhost
Thank you to everyone who has helped to get this project together (especially Beccy and Shane who put the foundations together over the last few years) and we are already having sightings come in. Sightings like Cats amazing piece of video (https://www.facebook.com/groups/106564446031865/)  helps us to understand more about the seahorses on the islands so that we can know more and to help advise the Maltese Government on the best ways to protect these incredible fish, so they are there for everyone to see for many years to come. We are also working with local biologist Paul Camilieri who is Maltese but will be doing his PhD in Plymouth from December. His PhD is based on Seahorses around the Mediterranean.

Dear all Lila and her sisters Phoebe and Thia have been really busy lately, not only have they raised another £20 from the sale of their Hammabead Seahorses (even one done by Thia in the colours of The Seahorse Trust) they have also visited the beautiful Seahorse Fountain in the Jewish Quarter of Rhodes Town on the stunning island of Rhodes. We are so grateful to Lila and her dedicated team who work so hard to raise the profile and plight of seahorses. It gives us hope here at the trust that the next generation will carry on caring for these endangered enigmatic animals. Thank you to them and to Mum and Dad for allowing us to show these pictures.

There is a new interesting paper written by Steff Lamb on the difference in behaviour of Short Snouted Seahorses in captivity and in the wild. Steff wrote this as her MSc write up. She did the captive work at the National Marine Aquarium in Plymouth and we helped her on the wild work. Well worth a read. It is on our conservation page under the downloads https://www.theseahorsetrust.org/research.aspx

London Sea Life Centre put on an amazing event for Father’s Day weekend and raised a staggering £442 to go towards The Seahorse Trust’s work. Bex and Jenny and the events team organized this well-attended event some time ago and have worked so hard getting it together.

Amongst the incredible events they put on were:

• Name a seahorse – which was popular!
• A  ‘Guess how many babies in dad’s pouch’ competition with a male seahorse with a jar full of glass beads. Everyone loved it and the closest guess won a Snorkel with Sharks experience for 2.
• They sold seahorsey Father’s Day cards in exchange for donations.
• The did lots of daily seahorse talks during which they got a dad volunteer to come up and gradually dressed him in a silly seahorse costume as they were talking about the different body parts (we’ve got a tail, a crown, a snout, a pouch etc) And we gave a prize mug to all the volunteers.

It was an exciting weekend and there are already plans to repeat it next year.

Here at the trust we would like to offer a massive thank you to Bex and Jenny and to all the team at London and many thanks to Sea Life for their continued support for our work.

One of our supporters Lucy has organised a great art evening at the Café Parisien Portsmouth on Thursday the 15th of August, with donations going to the work of The Seahorse Trust. Please support Lucy’s hard work and pop along and support the project. Thank you so much to Lucy and the team for their amazing hard work and good luck with the evening.