Plunging into Mexico’s seahorse story

We are keen to advise Mexico on how best to meet its commitments under national law and international policy. To support this, we are collaborating with Professor Nuno Simões at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) on research that will help guide a national plan to protect seahorses. As part of this work, our PhD student and researcher, Ruth Arnold, carried out field research along Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, focusing on the Vulnerable Lined seahorse (Hippocampus erectus), the Near Threatened Long-snout seahorse (Hippocampus reidi), and the really small Dwarf seahorse (Hippocampus zosterae).

For her fisheries and trade research, Ruth spent 10 weeks conducting 350 interviews with fishers, traders, divers, and community members across 25 coastal sites along 600 km of the Peninsula’s coastline. To ensure these surveys were effective and respectful, Ruth worked closely with local fishing cooperatives, three non-governmental organizations, and three government agencies.

Ruth found that seahorses were often obtained as bycatch in shrimp trawls and other fishing gears, even though such capture is banned. On Mexico’s Gulf and Caribbean coasts, many fishers were unaware of the ban, and enforcement was limited at best.

For the biological research, Ruth spent two more months completing scuba dives and push net sampling around the Peninsula. Diving 60 times amongst murky seagrass, beautiful reefs, and even some artificial habitats, she found a total of 32 seahorses underwater. While depressingly few in number, these observations do set valuable baselines for further standardized seahorse monitoring… and will assist in the species distribution models that Ruth is now building.

In tackling such modelling, Ruth is now working with Alejandro Nájara Medellín, who is generously sharing his data on the fourth Mexican seahorse species, the Giant seahorse (Hippocampus ingens), which lives on Mexico’s Pacific coast.

Our goal is to provide the spatial evidence base that is needed to develop a National Plan of Action for seahorse conservation along Mexico’s coastlines.