Instinct Is To Swim To The Surface

Now and then the seahorse opened its tiny tube mouth, and the short, broad hyoid bone would bend downward in an absurd resemblance to a very blunt, second lower jaw. At four o'clock two more young seahorses slipped out of the opening of the pouch corral. This was distended and throbbing with life-the pressure and struggles of little heads and bodies being plainly discernible on the surface as intermittent dimples and bulges. A few minutes later a loud cry arose from my watcher and an instant after, with my hand lens, I was at the aquarium.

The parent Hippocampus had taken a firm grip with his tail around the branch of a sea-fern near the bottom and was swaying back and forth with head drawn in and the body and pouch pushed far forward. As I watched, the body was drawn back, and then, every muscle being brought into play, his whole being again strained forward. The upper third of the pouch revealed a small round orifice.

As the pouch reached its utmost distention, the opening enlarged slightly and with a convulsive movement there was ejected a mass, a mist, a whole herd of young. They were thrown into the world in the shape of a rounded ball, which, like a smoke-ring or a bomb from a firework, held together as it moved rapidly upward and obliquely forward through the water. Only when it began to lose impetus, ten or twelve inches away, did it spray out into long streamers and scattered blobs of infant Pegasi. From the moment of slackened paternal impulse the individual seahorse motes assumed individual activity, swimming, twining their tails around themselves and one another, lashing out from side to side for all the world like diminutive crocodiles.

Five more parental H E ejections took place before the pouch was empty, and the fourth and fifth were both still ball-like, revolving slowly upward, while the earlier ones had spread out into a subsurface film of frisking young Hippocampi. The pouch did not collapse as I expected it would, but for another half hour was only slightly shrunken. Yet the last of the young had emerged-three hundred and six in all. This was the end, and in the morning the parent's pouch was indistinguishable and the green color had given way to a suit of dark brown, starred with white and faced with yellow-green.

The story was once told and has been repeated many times of how the young seahorses return, at the approach of danger, to their father's pouch. It is a charming idea but is quite untrue. There is no bond between offspring and parent once they are shot out of his pocket, and their instinct to swim up to the surface and toward the light is wholly unlike his ideas of a proper trajectory-which is down and among the protective fronds of seaweed.