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Pygmy seahorses with Dr. Richard Smith · Lightning Strikes Twice

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: Hello, and welcome to Lightning Strikes Twice, the Seattle Aquariums podcast, where we get to spend a little extra time with the experts who appear during our Lightning Talks broadcast.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_02: My name is Carrie Gerand.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_02: I use pronouns she and her, and I am an interpretation supervisor as well as a diver here at the Seattle Aquarium.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_02: And with me today is I'm Amy Olson.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_04: My pronouns are she, her, and I'm a research scientist, and we will both be your hosts today.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_02: Always excited to have both of us in the house, and maybe even more excited to have our guest with us in, I guess in person, in person being online, but in real time today, we get to speak with Richard Smith, who is a pygmy seahorse biologist with the IUCN Seahorse, Pipe Fish, and Sea Dragon Specialist Group.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_02: And on top of that, also an author and underwater photographer.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome, Richard, and thank you so much for joining us from all the way across the ocean.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for having me.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: Well, last time when it was the five-minute talks, it was 2 a.m.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: or something.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: So that just, I'm afraid, wasn't gonna, I just wasn't gonna give you my best five minutes, I don't think.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: So hopefully I can make up for it now.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_02: A hundred percent.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_02: And we we understand.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_02: I think I think everybody understands that 2 a.m.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_02: might be hard for a lot of us to bring our best selves to the table.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_02: But we are really happy to dig in a little bit more and learn even more, if possible, about pygmy seahorses.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_02: Perfect.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, we last heard from Richard, like Carrie said, during our last lightning talk, Seahorses and Sea Dragons.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_04: You can check that out along with all of our other past lightning talks on our Seattle Aquarium YouTube channel.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_04: I'm super excited to dive into chatting more about Pygmy Seahorses, Masters of Miniature, which is so cute because they are so cute.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_04: And I've never seen one in in real life.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_04: Richard, as you mentioned, your five-minute talk that would have happened in the middle of the night for you is such a short amount of time that I can't imagine you covered everything that you wanted to chat about that day.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_04: So is there anything that you want to share out now to our audience that you might have had to cut from your five-minute talk?
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: Ooh, well, the problem is I can go on and on and on about pygmy seahorses.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: But actually, as you said that, I should maybe define what a pygmy seahorse is, because you also have a dwarf seahorse in that's endemic to like Florida and things.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't know, maybe perhaps you even have them in the aquarium, or sometimes they're kept in aquaria, but they're about an inch long, and they're like regular seahorses, but an inch long.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas the the pygmies that are my focus especially adapted to be really, really tiny.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: So the biggest pygmy seahorse is about two and a half centimetres.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: I actually know what that is, an inch is.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's let's say three quarters of an inch.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_04: That sounds about right.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: And the smallest one doesn't even stretch across a dime.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: And they have a couple of adaptations for their tiny size, which is they have a single gill opening to breathe from, and they have their their babies held inside the male's trunk rather than a pouch on his tail.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, that just to say what a pygmy seahorse is, really, to that makes it different from the bigger ones.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_04: Great.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_04: I didn't know that there was also a dwarf seahorse.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_04: I would have probably assumed that it was the same as the pygmies and just, you know, different vernacular for different countries.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: Well, they call it the pygmy seahorse, actually.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: I think in Florida they call it the pygmy seahorse, which really just makes sense.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a whole big to-do with pygmy seahorses and and tiny seahorses.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_04: Thanks for setting us straight straight-ish, straighter than we were before.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's a windy road.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_04: It's a windy road.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_04: So for the folks that are listening that were in attendance during our online lightning talks, they had a chance to submit a bunch of questions to ask you directly.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_04: And we've saved all of those for our conversation today.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_04: And Kerry, did you have one that you wanted to jump into?
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_04: Or my God, there's so many good questions.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_04: It's hard to pick.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_02: It is hard to pick.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_02: I admittedly, I I told Amy this yesterday.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, I just feel like I could I could listen about pygmy seahorses all day.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_02: But it's really exciting when there's something like I know what a pygmy seahorse is.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_02: I'm familiar with them, or at least some of maybe the more common ones that we've known about for a while.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_02: But I it's really fun and exciting to like learn something new about these things that are out there in the ocean.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I think so fascinating and such involved lives.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_02: One of my questions kind of dovetails nicely with a question that we got from the audience, which was essentially like you you have discovered and named two new species of pygmy seahorses recently.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_02: And one of those was found in South Africa.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_02: Like, as somebody who is a specialist and expert in pygmy seahorses, like, where do you decide?
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_02: Like, maybe we should look over here for a new species of pygmy seahorse.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_02: Like, what is it that drew you to South Africa or Japan or different waters to find these animals?
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, they're so tiny that it really is like looking for a needle in a haystack quite often.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: The South African pygmy, actually, it wasn't me that discovered it.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: I had some friends who were in South Africa.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: They'd gone to look for a pipe horse that was believed to be new.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: They got there, but the weather was absolutely terrible.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: So they couldn't dive.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: We're trying to ask people about this pipe horse because they were stuck on land and didn't really know what to do with themselves.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: And a dive instructor said, Oh, I've seen a pipe horse and showed them a picture.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: And they were like, Hold on a second, this isn't right.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: And they sent me the picture, and I was like, Wow, yeah, okay, this is the first pygmy seahorse in the whole Indian Ocean.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the nearest pygmy seahorse that we've known of is found in Indonesia, so thousands of miles away, which was incredible.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: But they ultimately never did get in the water to go looking for that pygmy pipe horse.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: But it was a good friend of mine, Lo Clarson's, was working on an endemic seahorse in South Africa at the time.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so she was based there.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: I planned a trip and off we went to the the coast on just south of Mozambique border, and we had six dives to try and find these pygmy seahorses, which was really a needle in a haystack.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_01: It was really a lot of pressure because I mean you guys have good, I mean, you're both divers, and you're you must be hardcore to dive in the cold waters, and I'm sure it's like rough and stuff.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: I'm used to diving in in Indonesia where it's ever so calm and there's maybe a current or something, but it's lovely and tropical.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: So it was a bit of a baptism by fire to go to South Africa where the waves are huge and crashing and the tenders going through these massive waves that may or may not turn the boat over.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: It was quite the adventure.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_01: But then to try and find pygmy seahorses with my each.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_04: I can imagine.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: And these are pygmies actually.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: It was yeah, it was crazy.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: Some of the pygmies that I spoke about in my talk live on Gorgonian corals, but this one just literally can be anywhere.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my gosh.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_02: So how do you find it?
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_02: There's no starting point.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_02: You're not even like, okay, let me go find that Gorgonian.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_02: Like, that's where we're gonna look.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my goodness.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: It was really a stressful in six dives.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: We all we had.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: But we were lucky.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: We found a pair, and then I even found a baby, which you don't often see babies.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: It was, I mean, its head was almost the size of a grain of grain of sand.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_04: I was gonna say the pygmies are already so small, and I'm imagining a baby is like, you must have really excellent eyesight.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: I was thinking of the same thing.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: Now I'm in my mid-40s, so suddenly I'm holding things further away.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_04: They make readers for your masks now that I have some coverers use.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's the way to go, but that's embarrassing as like the pygmy expert to be going with readers, and I can't see tiny things.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_02: Just imagining you down there with a magnifying glass, like looking around.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: That is that's what my friend Wendy does.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: She has a little magnifying glass, off she goes.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: But we did find them, and then we also had one dive to find the pygmy pipe horse that started the whole thing, and we found that too.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_02: What a wonderful like story of of kind of happenstance that it just it all it all came together so perfectly.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_02: And so with the discovery of that pygmy seahorse in South Africa, what how how many species do we know of and have we identified thus far of pygmy seahorses?
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_02: What are we up to?
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_01: There are eight now.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_02: Eight species.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: Which is pretty incredible given that we started this millennium with one.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: So seven have been described since then.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_01: There's two that live on Gorgonian corals.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: One lives on a soft coral, and the other's kind of free living, which makes them tricky to study, really.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: Some of them have only been seen once or twice or a handful of times.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's pretty crazy.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I know what I'm doing.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_02: If I ever get out to the coral triangle in Indonesia area, I'm gonna be out there with a magnifying glass next to some Gorgonians looking for pygmy seahorses.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_02: You must.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: Life goes.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_02: I would love to.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_02: Amy, you want to go?
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_02: We can plan, we can plan the trip.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_02: Let's go.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: We'll finish this first, then you can go.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, okay.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_02: Let's still have a few more hours of work here in the States.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, Amy, any any curiosities, things for you that popped up that you wanted to ask?
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_04: Uh we had some really interesting questions come in about their biology.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_04: And like I said in the beginning, I don't know very much about seahorses and even less about pygmy seahorses.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_04: One of the questions that an audience member asked was, How large of a brood do pygmy seahorses have?
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_04: Do you know?
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah, I um I think I spoke briefly about Tom Dick Harry and Josephine, who were a group that I studied and spent hours and hours, hundreds of hours actually recording their behaviors.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: So I watched The Pregnancy, and every morning and evening I would go down and it turned out to be mornings, that I would see they do their courtship dances, which is so cute when it's teeny tiny.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: They would meet in this they'd actually sleep in the same place together every night.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: Then they'd wake up, do their little courtship dances, then go about their day.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: But it was also the same time after the male's pregnancy that he would give birth.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: And you could set it like clockwork.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: I would know that it would be, okay, today's the day that Tom's giving birth.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: So I would make sure to be there.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I saw him swimming from the little sleeping area that they would be in, and he would go to the edge of the Gorgonian where the currents were a bit stronger, and he would give birth.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: And on the several occasions that I saw them giving birth, there was about half a dozen, six to eight babies, which is not many, but they're so tiny, and they're putting so much effort into raising these offspring.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: They come out at about three millimeters long, so you can see them, and I think in my in my shots you can actually see some of the babies.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: But it's a small brood, but actually on that occasion, Josephine was mating with two different males alternately over the gestation period, which is weird for seahorses.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's actually the only time it's ever been seen in a seahorse.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: But I think the broods in that case were smaller compared to what they might be if she just had one partner.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: I think probably a dozen would be about average for Denise Pygmy seahorse.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: But Bargabanti is slightly bigger and fatter.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: So I think they've been recorded to have maybe high 30s maximum of babies.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, not millions, like you like many, like damsel fish or something might have thousands.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_04: Six is a lot less than I expected.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_04: For the female that was mating with two males, do you know if the eggs are being fertilized in the same brood by the both males?
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_04: So the babies are potentially have different parents?
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: Well, actually it's cool, and that's basically why male seahorses put so much huge effort into raising the brood, is because they know that every single baby that they're brooding within their brood pouch is their own.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: The female will she'll she sort of hydrates eggs, it's called, and they swell up a few days, four, three or four days before she transfers them.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: They grow in size.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: So they're kind of prepared, ready to be fertilized.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: Then when the two of them mate, the male and female have their little openings that seal together.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: And as she transfers the eggs over to the male, they're unfertilized until they enter his pouch and he fertilizes them on the way in.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, okay.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: And once they're in the pouch, he closes it for the rest, the entire duration of the of the rest of the pregnancy.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_01: Because if salt water came in, it would kill them.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my goodness.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_02: Thinking about all the effort that goes into that process of having all of their young and and just it's like imagining all of this happening on such a small scale.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_02: It's kind of interesting to transition to the next question we got from an audience member, which was thinking about the predators of pygmy seahorses being so small.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_02: Are there are there distinct predators for these pygmy seahorses in various areas?
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_02: Or is it a little bit more generalist because they're just so tiny?
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_02: Or does their camouflage just it's so amazing there's not that many things that naturally are preying on them?
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think basically I would say that their evolution has driven them to be so small to sort of find their little niche that means that they really don't have any predators that are, especially like adapted predators that really are specific to them.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, things would incidentally just eat them if they saw them and decided to, or just were chomping a reef, maybe and accidentally ate one.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: There on Gorgonian corals, you get long-nosed hawkfish, which is a beautiful little two or three inch long fish that's sort of white base with orange crosses on it.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's really a beautiful fish.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: And there was always a bit of an urban legend that if you saw one of those on a Gorgonian, that it's no point in looking for pygmy seahorses because they eat them.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_01: And it's been seen quite a lot of times that they will eat pygmy seahorses.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: But my theory is actually that it that you see them eating them because actually when divers are going in, and often photographers get some of the worst rap, and often quite rightly, in that they disturb animals so much, often using big poking devices or something to get an image that they want to be able to show off on Instagram or whatever.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: And it really disturbs that the pygmy and causes a lot of stress because they're not used to having any sort of predators like that.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: So in that case, their only defense is to start swimming away or to shake, or I mean, really, they're just kind of freaking out.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: And in that case, that draws then the long-nosed hawkfish in to eat them.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: But I've often seen them sharing a gorgonian together.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_01: So when it's not when they're not stressed and they're just going about their daily lives, they seem to be camouflaged enough to just chip about on the Gorgonian.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_02: Well, hopefully, if anybody is out there and they're ever getting a chance to see them, giving them plenty of space and not stressing them out so that they keep doing their thing and just enjoy the moment.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_02: And yeah, good kind of makes me happy.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_02: Good to know that there's nothing that's particularly out there that is specializing in those pygmy seahorses, but it sounds like could definitely be opportunistic things that happen as as it does out in the ocean.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_02: There's there's a lot of things that are hunting and eating all sorts of small stuff.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_02: And I kind of a follow-up question, if if I can add one more in there.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_02: You you mentioned, you know, they they have evolved to have sort of this little niche that they have fit themselves into.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_02: Can you talk a little bit about some of the evolutionary history of a pygmy seahorse?
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_02: Like how how did we end up with pygmy seahorses?
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, I think that is it.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you go to a coral reef and you don't see seahorse, like regular massive seahorses at all, really.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_01: If you were sort of ambled into a sandy habitat or a sort of seagrassy habitat, that's where you find the bigger seahorses.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_01: But the pygmies really are on coral reefs almost exclusively.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: So I think their their evolution was driven to sort of fill niches that were available on coral reefs.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_01: And that happened to be that being teeny tiny sort of suited them.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_01: That's then they then diversified to fill the different niches, whether it be living on soft corals or gorgonians or just holding onto bits of algae or whatever.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_01: But the pygmies sort of split off about 18 million years ago from the other seahorses.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_01: So they've been kind of separate for really quite a long time.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_02: That's maybe longer than I was thinking.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know what I was thinking, in all honesty, but I was like, wow, that that feels like a really long time.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_01: Well, even I said that about the Japanese pygmy looked so superficially similar to this other one that you see the Pontos pygmy seahorse in Indonesia.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_01: They'd split eight million years or ago.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_01: And they look almost identical, but I guess there's not a lot of selective pressures on them to change.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_01: Once they're teeny tiny, they just can eat really small crustaceans and and then they're fine.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_04: Sounds like they found a good niche.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_04: Speaking of longevity, um, someone was curious to ask how long do pygmy seahorses live for?
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_04: And I don't I don't even know how long regular seahorses live for, either, if you know either of those answers.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_01: Well, yes, I do.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I can guess to guesstimate, we're gonna say.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_01: So pygmies I think live for about 12 to 18 months, so not very long at all.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: And it's interesting, I was just speaking to someone the other day about how you can go to the same gorgonian years later and there'll be a whole new sort of host of pygmies that have settled there.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know if it's that if there's a group there that new recruits come in and settle and just join the group, or if it's just that that Gorgonian is really a perfect habitat for pygmies, so they just always seem to settle there.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, they don't live extremely long, but the size that they settle is about 1.3 centimeters long, and they're I should really have learned what inches are, shouldn't I?
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_04: Anyway, it's fine.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_04: Americans still know what centimeters are.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's true.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_02: They're still on a ruler, so like anybody at home, we can like go get a grab a ruler.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: Beginning of this podcast, tell people to get a ruler handy.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_01: So you know what I'm on about.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_01: But anyway, so yeah, when they settle, they're almost immediately able to start reproducing.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, they as soon as they settle, and actually, what some of the stuff with the reproduction that I mentioned earlier, so Tom, this well, the males would go and give birth, and then they would, after giving birth, they would go straight back to Josephine or a female in their little sleeping nook and immediately start courting and receive a new clutch of eggs within 20 minutes or so of having given birth.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_04: 20 minutes?
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_04: Oh my gosh.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_04: I'm a mom.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_04: I have a two-year-old, and I was and I'm just imagining back-to-back pregnancies?
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_04: No, thank you.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, extreme back to back.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_01: There's a show to be made about that.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_04: Yes.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_04: Well, that's incredible though, that they live, they only live for 12 to 18 months, but they visually and maybe genetically are haven't changed a lot over time.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_04: You know, you'd think with so many generations and turnover that they would really be different over time, like over their evolutionary history.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_01: They're just so extremely good at what they do, I think.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: Like their camouflage is just incredible.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if there's anywhere to go.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_04: They've already figured it out and they're like, We're good.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_02: They're like, Why do we keep getting discovered?
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_02: Like they're trying their best to not be discovered, so nobody learns their secrets.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_02: They can just hang out and but I forgot to say the big
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Seahorses.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_01: A buddy of mine, Dave Harasty, he works in Australia and he's found the oldest seahorse through some of his tagging work.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it was about seven.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_01: Oh wow.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_01: Seven or eight years.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_01: So that's not even that long, really.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: I would sort of imagine that they lived longer.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_01: They have loads of babies, though.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_01: Those the bigger ones that can be up to a thousand.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_04: Oh wow.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_01: So we ignore them.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_04: Here to talk about regular seahorses.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_02: Kept thinking, I was like, we keep calling them regular seahorses.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, are they just seahorses?
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_02: Like is there.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: I think to most people they're seahorses.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_02: Other seahorses.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: I'll bet.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_02: On that note, um, thought this might be a good time perhaps for us to take a little bit of a break.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_02: We do need to take a quick one, um, but we still have lots of audience questions for Richard today, and we're gonna be digging into even more of those in just a moment.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_03: Calling all adult ocean lovers, join us at After Hours, the one evening each month when adults take over the Seattle Aquarium.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_03: At this 21 plus event, you can experience our habitats at night, taste delicious food and drinks, enjoy special programming, and more.
• 23:18
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• 23:25
  SPEAKER_03: And now back to the show.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_02: All right, we are back.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_02: So let's go ahead and jump right into a few more questions.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_02: I know I've got a really interesting one here.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_02: You mentioned in the lightning talk this relationship that some of the pygmy sea horses have with Gorgonians, that they'll live on the same Gorgonian their entire life, that they're they're not leaving.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_02: They're in that one spot.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_02: So are they territorial of that Gorgonian or or other corals, soft corals they might be associated with?
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_02: Or are they are they happy to share their space?
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_01: Well, so I studied quite a few groups for their social and reproductive behaviors to try and figure some of that out.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, they when they're born, I mentioned with Tom's babies, they they they're born, they then float off in the plankton for probably two weeks.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: And then using chemical cues and other cues, they find their way back to a new Gorgonian, which wouldn't be the same one that they were born on, just to sort of get genetic mixing and things.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_01: So they then settle on the Gorgonian.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe there's already a group there, but they they don't appear to be territorial at all.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_01: There's presumably maybe a carry-in capacity on each Gorgonian, so you wouldn't be able to have like hundreds on just the same Gorgonian.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_01: They'll they'll just sort of thin out somehow or they don't settle.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_01: But I've uh some of one of the groups that I studied was three males sharing a Gorgonian with one female, which was really interesting.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_01: And it seems that the females dictate the little sleeping nook that they all go to.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_01: So the the female she had this little place that was really well protected by the Gorgonian, and she would sleep there, and then the males were just drawn to her, and like they would all do their little courtship dances there.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_01: But I studied another group where there was two females and one male, and the females would sleep on different sides of the Gourgonian, and the male would travel between them, although only mating with one of them.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was just in case his original partner something happened to her, he'd got like a backup, which doesn't sound very unromantic, really, does it?
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_01: But um anyway, that's what happened.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_01: But then there were three pairs on another Gourgonian, and I mapped their territories and they would just have overlap within them.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_01: So they weren't protecting a certain area or anything.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they just seemed quite happy.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: There's enough resources, there's plenty of food for them, live together in harmony.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_04: That's great.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_04: Like a little commune.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 26:13
  unknown: Yeah.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_04: If you started like a live camera feed and just kind of occasionally narrated what was happening, I'll bet you would get like hundreds of thousands of people.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: We need to get David Attenborough.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_00: He'd be in on that, I'm sure.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_02: I wouldn't get any work done if that exists.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_04: So thinking a little bit in how the seahorses kind of fit into the oceanic environment that we've been talking about.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_04: Someone was in wondering what what and how do seahorses contribute to the overall ecology of a coral reef?
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's an interesting one.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_01: Probably not that much in terms of, you know, they can eat the little tiny crustaceans, but not in quantities enough that I imagine that they could impact those populations, really.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_01: And like the Gorgonians, I did population surveys for Denise, and I found them to be the lowest density of any like seahorse population.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: And they only inhabited 8% of the potential Gorgonians.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: So they're really rare animals.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: So I just don't think they're having that much impact on the community as a whole.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_01: But what they are doing is just adding to the incredible biodiversity that coral reefs support.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what just constantly blows my mind is that these little animals are there and they've got these lives going on, and they're just one of many thousands of species that coral reefs accommodate.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_01: So it's that, and we'd be all the poorer for losing them, I think.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_04: Absolutely.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that kind of makes me it leads nicely into some of we had a few questions just around, you know, what are some of the threats pygmy seahorses are up against?
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_02: Are there things that we can do?
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_02: You talked a little bit in your lightning talk about another project that you have coming up, looking at the critically endangered, if I remember it correctly, Walea.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, exactly.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_02: And and that they are critically endangered, meaning there simply are not very many of them left out there uh in the world.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_02: So if you could talk a little bit, how how can we help to protect these animals and what are some of the challenges and barriers that that they're up against that maybe we could we could help to solve that problem?
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think for the pygmies particularly, I think they're quite different than the other seahorses, which trawling, I mean, habitat loss is a big issue for all seahorses, pygmy or regular, as we've decided to call them.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_01: But trawling can be a really big problem for the other seahorses.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_01: You know, like I don't eat shrimps or anything because of the bycatch, and even if they're not trawled, the the habitat or the area that they grow, and aquaculture, the shrimps, is usually inshore areas where there would ordinarily be mangroves or seagrasses, and we're losing that habitat because of those.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_01: But for pygmies, really coral reefs really struggling.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_01: Over the last few years, particularly, I've been jumping in in places that are absolutely remote, like the very corner of Papua New Guinea, for example.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_01: I jumped in and the whole reef unexpectedly was pure white and was bleaching.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I was there for six weeks, and over that time I saw the corals go from white, bleached, then they died and still stayed white.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_01: But then as the flesh of the coral sort of sloughed off, then algae would settle and they'd go back to brown, and superficially you're like, oh, the reefs recovered.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_01: But it it's really dramatic that then basically 90% of the corals in that area died.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_01: And coral reefs are changing, and it's terrifying to go to these remote protected places, and climate change is just having its way with these coral reefs.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_01: And that's impacting a lot of species, but pygmy seahorses, of course, are amongst those.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_01: The structure is being destroyed of coral reefs just by nature of the bleaching.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_01: The species that live on Gorgonians, whilst the Gorgonians themselves don't bleach because they don't have those algae in their cells, they are more susceptible to disease when the waters are warmer.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_01: So I've been seeing recently some of the Gorgonians getting like a fungus starting to grow on them, and then the flesh of the coral is sort of coming off.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_01: So those are ways that they're being impacted by sort of habitat degradation and climate change.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_01: But particularly the Walea pygmy seahorse, it's found only in a tiny bay in central Indonesia.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_01: It was described in 2008 and really hasn't, there's never been any research on it because it's in such a remote location.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_01: It lives on soft corals that do bleach.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_01: They have Caesantheli, the little algae in their cells.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_01: So they bleach and then they can disappear, but unlike um like a hard coral that leaves a skeleton, those soft corals bleach and you'd never know they were there.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_01: And given that we really don't know the populations of the the Walea pygmy seahorse beforehand, now that those corals are disappearing, it's all the more terrifying.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_01: I was due to go there in 2020 in search of these guys, just as the pandemic struck.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_01: So obviously that got way laid.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_01: And it's taken me, I'm actually due to go in a few weeks.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it's taken me all that time to manage to get a boat together to get to this remote corner of Indonesia to go and just do a sort of ad hoc quick estimate.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_01: And we're just applying for funding at the moment, actually, to get a proper project together to go and do population estimates and things, whereas my trip's a recreational diving trip.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, it's uh yeah, it's kind of terrifying the way coral reefs are going.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_01: But hopefully we can make a difference by sharing some of the stories of the animals there.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_02: I agree.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, I think there's I think there's a lot, there's a lot that we can all do to help those coral reefs support so much biodiversity in our oceans and play such a critical role.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_02: And when we think about anything we can do to reduce the impacts of climate change, I think it's gonna be hopefully a win for our oceans and for those pygmy seahorses.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_02: And if all the stories of our pygmy seahorses, you know, I I hope we've made some new fans out there today.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_02: That that that that are gonna that are gonna get out there and help to make sure that uh what Tom Dick and Josephine, if I remember correctly, have um a healthy home.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_02: And well, fingers crossed for you in that next upcoming project that you're able to get out there and learn some some critical information about those little seahorses.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, thank you.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_02: Well, unfortunately, I I kind of hate to say this.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_02: This might need to be it for this episode of Lightning Strikes Twice.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_02: It's just been such a pleasure, Richard.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much for carving time out with the time difference and everything uh for being here, but did want to put a shout out there.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_02: If people want to learn more or engage more with the work that you're doing, where where should they look?
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_02: I know you've got an amazing book as well that people could check out.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_02: Where are some spots we can find you?
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_01: My book is called The World Beneath.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_01: You may have gathered I I love a pygmy seahorse, so it's not just pygmy seahorses, but the book is yeah, underwater natural history that's sort of a passion project full of my photos.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's all of my dives over the last 30 years, things I've seen.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_01: So that is a fun thing to read and look at pictures.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_01: But my website is dr dash richardsmith.com.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_01: Instagram is dr.richardsmith.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_01: Lots of dots and dashes just to confuse everyone.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_01: Oh no, I've said that now, it's really gonna confuse everyone.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but yeah.
• 34:24
  unknown: Yeah.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna sneak in a weird random question.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_02: If you weren't looking at tiny little things all the time, is there a larger megafauna type animal that you would want to study?
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_02: If you had to go big.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_01: I don't love big fish, I'll be honest.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe a megamath shark.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_01: That'd be pretty cool.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_04: Opposite end of the spectrum.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I feel like you have to, yeah.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_04: Well, thank you again, Richard, for joining us.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_04: And thanks so much to you, the listener, for joining us today.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_04: Keep an eye out for our next regular lightning talks, and remember you can watch past episodes on the aquarium's YouTube channel.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_04: And until then, stay curious.