| YES | if the statement agrees with the views of the writer |
| NO | if the statement contradicts the views of the writer |
| NOT GIVEN | if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this |
Saving the Seahorses
A. Gregorio Dano is a seahorses fisherman, and he's not happy. A decade ago, he and the other subsistence fishers from the central Philippine village of Handumon supported their families by collecting dozens of seahorses a day from the coral reefs of nearby Danajon Bank. But as the six-month-long seahorse-fishing season begins next month, Dano will be lucky to catch a half dozen of the elusive fish in a full night’s diving, enough to buy only a day’s worth of rice.
B. Seahorses and their relatives, the only animal species whose males, rather than females, become pregnant, are popular with home collectors and public aquariums alike. Since the charismatic fish die easily in captivity, they must be replaced frequently from the wild. Dried seahorses are prized by practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine, in remedies for everything from asthma to impotence. As disposable income in China has risen over the last decade, so too has demand for seahorse-based cures. That has caused overfishing at Danajon Bank and throughout the fishes’ range, leading to the loss of at least 20 million wild seahorses a year. Populations have been plummeting everywhere seahorses are fished —'in sea grass beds and mangrove stands from Florida to Ecuador, and on coral reefs from India to Vietnam.
C. Last week 35 researchers and representatives of major public aquariums from around the world met at Chicago's John G. Shedd Aquarium to discuss what can be done to reverse the trend. “We’ve seen population declines of 50 per cent over the last five years, and that’s unacceptable,” says Amanda Vincent, a conservation biologist at Montreal’s McGill University and co-founder of Project Seahorse. One way to reduce aquariums’ dependence on wild stocks is to improve captive breeding techniques. Jorge Gomczjurado, a biologist at San Francisco’s Steinhart Aquarium, has spent the last year trying to raise Hippocampus ingens, the Giant Pacific seahorse. Prized as the largest of the seahorses at up to 12 inches long, H. ingens is also one of the trickiest to breed. Like all seahorses, they're fussy eaters, and in captivity they’re susceptible to disease. By experimenting with food supplements, Gomezjurado has managed to raise three successive generations.
D. Another researcher, a Ph.D. candidate at the London Institute of Zoology named Stephen Casey, has been studying the six-inch-long Tiger-Tail seahorse (H. comes), the most heavily exploited species on the Danajon Bank. Casey spent six weeks in Handumon, going out with seahorse fishers nightly to collect specimens. He paid the fishers the going rate for their catch, a few pesos each, which allowed him to sample without further depleting the population. His research will help determine whether seahorses can move from one spot on a reef to another. Adults rarely stray more than a few feet from their small home range, but juveniles might be transported to distant areas by waves or currents. If so, the progeny of an isolated pocket of reproducing adults would spread out, recolonizing distant reefs that have been depopulated by fishing.
E. The Shedd Aquarium is tackling the depopulation problem from a different angle. Together with Project Seahorse, Shedd’s merchandizing department developed a project with the Handumon villagers to lessen their dependency on seahorses. The Shedd gift shop now stocks 34 diffeient products made by Handumon fishers and their families. Straw beach mats and handbags with seahorse motifs are big sellers. Dano and his wife have gone into business making wooden diving goggles, sold at the Shedd gift shop for $7, and have earned enough to get out of debt and buy food and medicine for their six children.
F. Project Seahorse is also encouraging traditional Chinese medicine practitioners to identify alternatives to seahorses, and the researchers are helping villagers to develop sustainable fishing techniques. The villagers have established an 80-acre "no fishing” zone around Handumon. Populations of both seahorses and other species have rebounded so well that the idea is spreading to other villages, says Philippine biologist Marivic Pajaro, though the fish suffered a setback a year ago when the night watchman sneaked away to attend a fiesta and the area was poached of seahorses.
G. As the workshop concluded last week, Vincent said she was more hopeful than ever before that seahorse decline can be reversed before disaster strikes. She now hopes to get all of the "stakeholders”, including fishers, traders, medical practitioners and biologists, to meet together and work out how best to manage seahorses so that all parties — including the fish — get what they need. "Fish are seen as food, not wildlife," says London Zoo curator and Project Seahorse co-founder Heather Hall, summing up the difficulty of preserving underwater species. “We're just lucky that seahorses are about as cute as you get in the fish world." Those good looks may be what eventually saves them in the wild. The researchers hope that less popular but equally threatened species that share their watery homes may be saved in the bargain.