Photo: Valkyrie Pierce/Unsplash.
Citizen scientists are helping us learn more about seahorses.
For all its shortcomings, social media has enabled us to work together on meaningful projects if we so choose. Consider the citizen scientists who are expanding our knowledge of the natural world.
Erin Blakemore has a story at the Washington Post about the latest research on seahorses — and how you can help study them.
“Members of the public are helping to advance research on sea horses, the tiny fish that can be found in coral reefs, shallow waters and estuaries around the world, according to a study.
“When researchers looked at the results of public contributions to the iSeahorse science project between 2013 and 2022, they found the community effort enabled scientific advances in the field.
“Citizen contributions provided new information on 10 of 17 sea horse species with data once considered deficient and helped update knowledge about the geographic distribution of nine species, researchers wrote in the Journal of Fish Biology. Some of the observations even helped scientists better understand when and how sea horses breed. … According to the project website, iSeahorse has amassed about 11,000 observations from more than 1,900 contributors to date.
“Overall, the researchers were able to validate 7,794 of the observations from 96 countries and 35 sea horse species. The volunteer observers even noted rare species that traditional monitoring probably would not detect, they write.
“ ‘Seahorses are very much the sort of fascinating species that benefit from community science, as they are cryptic enough to make even formal research challenging,’ Heather Koldewey, the project’s co-founder and the lead on the Bertarelli Foundation’s marine science program, said in a news release. …
“Want to get involved? Visit https://projectseahorse.org/iseahorse/ to learn more. More at the Post, here.
And check out this page from the Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine, here. It reads, in part, “Seahorses are endangered teleost fishes under increasing human pressures worldwide. In Brazil, marine conservationists and policy-makers are thus often skeptical about the viability of sustainable human-seahorse interactions.
“This study focuses on local ecological knowledge on seahorses and the implications of their non-lethal touristic use by a coastal community in northeastern Brazil. Community-based seahorse-watching activities have been carried out in Maracaípe village since 1999, but remained uninvestigated until the present study. …
“We interviewed 32 informants through semi-structured questionnaires to assess their socioeconomic profile, their knowledge on seahorse natural history traits, human uses, threats and abundance trends.
“Seahorse-watching has high socioeconomic relevance, being the primary income source for all respondents. Interviewees elicited a body of knowledge on seahorse biology largely consistent with up-to-date research literature. Most informants (65.5 %) perceived no change in seahorse abundance. Their empirical knowledge often surpassed scientific reports, i.e. through remarks on trophic ecology; reproductive aspects, such as, behavior and breeding season; spatial and temporal distribution, suggesting seahorse migration related to environmental parameters.
“Seahorse-watching operators were aware of seahorse biological and ecological aspects. Despite the gaps remaining on biological data about certain seahorse traits, the respondents provided reliable information on all questions, adding ethnoecological remarks not yet assessed by conventional scientific surveys. We provide novel ethnobiological insight on non-extractive modes of human-seahorse interaction, eliciting environmental policies to integrate seahorse conservation with local ecological knowledge and innovative ideas for seahorse sustainable use. Our study resonates with calls for more active engagement with communities and their local ecologies if marine conservation and development are to be reconciled.”
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