Publications & Resources

A comprehensive database of Project Seahorse outputs

Moving toward spatial solutions in marine conservation with Indigenous Communities

Community and resource user support has often been declared as essential to achieving globally agreed targets for marine protection. Given that Indigenous Peoples in Canada have resource use rights, we engaged two Indigenous communities in British Columbia for their views on marine planning and protected areas. We developed a three-phased approach for executing our research: …

Souvenirs from the sea: an investigation into the curio trade of echinoderms in Mexico.

Marine curosities are collected from seas around the world, often with little understanding of the ecological impacts of such harvesting. As Latin America’s top destination for foreign tourists, Mexico was chosen for the first case study of the curio trade in echinoderms (any of a variety of invertebrate marine animals belonging to the phylum Echinodermata, …

Axes of excellence: a role for students as community-engaged scholars

The four axes of excellence in scholarship are discovery,integration, application, and teaching (Boyer 1990).Yet the predominant currency of recognition, prestige,and mobility in science is publication in top-tier acade-mic journals (Bedeian 1996). For both faculty and stu-dents, this creates a significant barrier to engagement incommunity-based scholarship. As competition for lim-ited science positions increases pressure to publish, …

How wild is the ocean? Assessing the intensity of anthropogenic marine activities in British Columbia, Canada

 The intensity of marine activities in the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) of British Columbia, Canada, was quantified. Humans use the ocean for a multitude of purposes, many of which have a direct impact on marine life and habitat. Yet such uses are seldom assessed in an integrated fashion. Using a GIS approach, spatial information for …

Validation of a method for estimating realized annual fecundity in a multiple spawner, the long-snouted seahorse (Hippocampus guttulatus) using underwater visual census.

The long-snouted seahorse (Hippocampus guttulatus) (Cuvier, 1829), was used to validate the predictive accuracy of three progressively realistic models for estimating the realized annual fecundity of asynchronous, indeterminate, multiple spawners. Underwater surveys and catch data were used to estimate the duration of the reproductive season, female spawning frequency, male brooding frequency, and batch fecundity. The …

A conservation trade-off? Interspecific differences in seahorse responses to experimental changes in fishing effort

A 2-year experimental seining programme and underwater visual censuses were undertaken to quantify the direct effects of active demersal fishing on the population structure and relative abundance of two sympatric seahorse species of conservation concern: the European long-snouted seahorse, Hippocampus guttulatus Cuvier 1829 and the short-snouted seahorse, Hippocampus hippocampus L. The influence of habitat preference on population-level …

Hippocampus queenslandicus Horne, 2001 – a new seahorse species or yet another synonym?

During the past six years, 15 new seahorse species (Syngnathidae: Hippocampus) have been described on the basis of morphological characters. This approach is known to be problematic, and most species names in Hippocampus are now considered to be synonyms. Genetic methods have great potential to resolve the confused taxonomy of the genus, but none have …