Sea horse keepers?

[MonoSebaelover]

Just checking to see if anyone else on this board keeps sea ponies. I currently have a brillian yellow Reidi Female and a gorgeous black male with tons of white spots (not ich the little glowing dots in his color) all over in a 20H. He is so pretty. I am hoping they breed and will produce cool little babies. Anyway just checking to see if there are any other sea horse keepers on board.

[Awestralian]

Ive thought about keeping them, but they seem to be tricky to feed from my reading.
What/how do you feed yours?

[Kit Walker]

They are not as difficult to feed depending on how you acquire them. I was actually lucky enough to be in my LFS during feeding when their seahorses were eating frozen brine shrimp. I ended up buying a male and female. I still however, feed them live brine shrimp most of the time. I would ask your LFS to feed them in front of you if you plan on buying them.

Awestralian, if you plan on keeping seahorses in a tropical heated tank I would avoid your local ones. The ones around NSW are coldwater species and often die in a heated tank. The tropical ones we get come from Bali.

[gcvt]

What type of filtration system are you using and how much current is there? I was thinking about building a Kreisel and trying either seahorses or jellies. Hmm.

[Awestralian]

Thanks Kit!

[Kit Walker]

My seahorse tank is just a 20G with an undergravel filter run by a small Aquaclear powerhead (Of my 9 tanks this is the only one I use UGF). I know UGF filters are usually non-favoured, but if you only feed the correct amount, the seahorses don't produce enough wastes to ever burden a UGF. The owner of my LFS keeps a colony of seahorses at home using UGF. I do however use a leftover eheim spraybar on the powerhead to reduce the blast of current.

Other than that I just have a fine crushed coral substrate, and I use a plastic coral to provide them with a hitching post. I also use a Seachem Ammonia Alert to give me any warning if a spike should occur.