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We have completed our research facility and are in the process of setting up some culture systems.
We are currently culturing H. erectus seahorses, Moina salina, Parvocalanus, tigriopus, opae ula, amphipods, berghia, phytoplankton and hybrid harlequin shrimp

Baby Seahorses Born 07/08/2001

above photos taken 08/03/2001

above photos taken 08/07/2001

I am not sure what species of seahorse these are.  We have had many cross matings with a male H reidi, but we have yet to get any offspring from such a cross.  The Baby seahorses were fed enriched rotifers for days 1 through 14.  From day 10 on they were also fed enriched fresh hatched baby brine shrimp.
Starting on 7/31, 3 day old enriched baby brine was added to their diet.
For size reference, the black object in the photos is a rio 2100 suction cup
I would like to wean the seahorses onto non-live food.  I have tried with both frozen and freeze dried cyclops but they showed no interest.  The cyclops will be too small within a few weeks so they wont work.  Mysis shrimp are too large and the seahorses will not be large enough to eat them for many months.  Frozen brine shrimp will not have the correct nutritional profile.
If anyone has any ideas as to how this has been done I would like to know.
080501 1 death in the family
08/12/01 removed seahorses from holding tank, cleaned tank and put them back.  They look to be in great shape and are all eating well.  They are fed every few hours during the day but their appetite seems to be diminished greatly by the end of the day.  

above pictures taken 08/13/2001

2nd death in the family on )8/19/2001 One of the babies was reddish in color when I came in in the morning.  A few hours later it was laying on the bottom still alive.  I removed it to an isolation cup and it died about 1 hour later

above photos taken 08/25/2001

As you can see from the above photos the babies are growing fast and are turning orange.  Most are solid orange, some are orange with black snouts and the rest are still black

September 2, 2001 3 deaths in the family.  Just when you think things are going well.  I only fed them once yesterday and they only had about 10 minutes to eat.  They are also getting extremely crowded.  It is not uncommon to see a seahorse with 2 or more others clinging to him. Do to the deaths I wasn't up to taking another photo.

September 9, 2001 They have been dropping like fleas.  4 one day 5 another 2 another etc.  I probably only have half of them left.  I think the problem is that they need a larger food source than baby brine shrimp.  I have been trying unsuccessfully to grow out brine in quantity to feed them.  I also purchased live saltwater mysis shrimp to start a culture.  Unfortunately, a friendly customer gave me about 500 saltwater guppies and dumped them in my mysis shrimp culture.  I will be getting more mysis next week but by the time they have offspring I fear it may be too late

09/14/2001
There are only 2 left.  Feeling I had nothing to loose 3 days ago  I gave the survivors (there were 10 at the time) which were dropping like fleas, a freshwater dip with formalin added.  I really didn't find anything on them that I believe could have been causing their deaths.  There was some planaria crawling around in the tank and I did find one baby mantis shrimp but he was small enough for them to eat .  I doubt he was big enough to bother  them and the dead ones never had any marks on them.  I have a small herd of saltwater mysis shrimp in the container with the survivors.  I add to it as it gets smaller so I imagine the ponies are eating the mysis.  3 to 4 times daily I dump brine shrimp enriched with the missing link rotifer food in the tank. 

9/27/01
We had a batch of 131 youngsters but were not prepared for them and didn't have enough rotifers to feed them.  I have them in a tank with a lot of caulerpa.  It appears we lost them all.

10/10/01
I still have one left.  I keep 4-20 live saltwater mysis shrimp in the tank with him.  As the mysis are consumed I add more.  The mysis are fed frozen cyclops.

We will see how the next batch goes.  I am not sure why I lost so many.  In summary there were 2 days in a row when they didn't get much to eat.  I had concerns about the size of the food being too small once they got over 3/4" long.  On the next batch I will make sure they get fed sufficiently and start adding live mysis when they reach 3/4" and keep them in a larger container (maybe they were strangling each other)  I am collecting brood stock now.  Under quarantine I have a female orange/yellow Caribbean seahorse (very rare) a juvenile female yellowish H reidi from Brazil in with a male H. reidi, and 5 assorted males out of quarantine.

I still cant grow out brine in quantity- Suggestions Please!

01/05/2002

I have one seahorse form each batch still alive.  The older one is about 2" long and is eating frozen mysis shrimp.  The younger one is about 1.25" long and is eating live adult brine shrimp

06/15/04 It is about time for an update.  We have very sporadically raised a few offspring to small saleable sizes.  As we get mated pairs we have been dispersing them to our customers to see if they could do any better.  I have had customers raise up to 6 from a single batch of H reidi.  A customer of ours recently visited one of the large public aquariums and spent a few days with the people in charge of their seahorse exhibit.  They didn't do things too much differently but there was one rather large difference.  The water movement in their tanks  was strong enough to keep the frozen mysis in suspension.  They accomplished this with the use of a bubble  wall on one side of the tank.  The males were removed from the tanks before giving birth, so all the offspring could be collected, and then returned.  The water movement for the babies was strong enough to keep them from sticking to the surface and to keep the rotifers or baby brine evenly dispersed in the water.  Everything else was pretty much the same as we had been doing.  I will be hooking up a bubble wall this week to see if it increases the appetites of our sea horses.  I hooked up the bubble wall.  I had to make a cover for the tank to keep the salt splash in.  The sea horses are eating much better with the increased water movement.  The bubbles are not bothering them.  On June 8th we had another batch which we lost all of.  They appeared to be getting stuck and /or going through the window screen on the side of the holding box.  We removed it and replaced it with 250 micron mesh for the next batch .
07/04/04  Another batch was born.  We only collected about 40. We put fresh hatched brine as well as rotifers in with them.  07/05/04 they are all going strong.
08/09/04 several batches later no survivors from previous batches.  A couple of stragglers from the last batch.  I have axed the bubble wand in the hatchery tank.  Our hatchery tank is only 2" by 4" by 8".  I believe a much larger tank might work better.  preferably one with some depth.  Their current tank is only 4" deep.  With a deeper tank they will be less likely to come in contact with the dreaded surface.  I am thinking that we ought to try something easier.  Has anyone had any success with H reidi?

03/17/2005

I have just finished a new baby rearing tank.  It is online with our coral system. The overall tank size is approx 30 gallons.  There is a cylindrical tank within a rectangular tank.   It circulates the water in a vertical plane and I should be able to adjust it to keep the babies off the surface or at least that is my hope.  The pictures shows the details of the new system.  Water enters the void space on the right through a 250 micron strainer and enters the cylindrical are although 4 1.5" holes at the right top covered with 250 micron mesh.  Water leaves through 4 similar holes on the left bottom. In the middle on the bottom I put a pvc ring with a piece of onion mesh bag glued to it.  The babies do not appear interested in hitching to it yet.  There is  bubble wall on the left side about 1/2 way up.

We came in this morning and approximately 60 baby H. reidi in the adult seahorse tank.  This is the first batch from the parents.  We captured them with a rigid tube and transferred them to the baby system.  One of the babies got stuck in the back corner between the plastic.  I put some underwater epoxy in there to fill the void. We have a continuous rotifer culture going so we fed the rotifers some missing link and DTS and then harvested  2 1 quart portions around 1130am and fed them to the babies.  They appeared to be eating.  We fed them every 2 to 3 hours the first day with no mortalities.

03/18/2005 A.M. The babies are all still  alive.  None stuck on the surface.  Will try a few fresh hatched brine today and continue to feed rotifers every 2 to 3 hours.
03/20/05 approx 10 dead 
03/21/05 1 dead  still to small to eat baby brine.  Babies still just floating  in the water and not making any effort to attach to the netting in the tank

03/28 About 14 alive.  none have died for the past 3 or 4 days.  We started feeding fresh hatch brine today.  Cant say for sure whether they were eating them but they are large enough to eat them without any difficulty.

04/01/05 14 old ones still alive.  We had another batch of babies- harvested about 25 of them and put them in with the older babies.  Two days ago I added a 5 gallon Kent doser to feed baby brine shrimp continuously throughout the day.  Baby brine are hatched daily and separated from the eggs.  The BBB and some green water are dumped into the dosing jug and set at a fast drip.  Today added rotifers to the dosing bucket to feed the new babies.

04/02/05 
No deaths.  had approx 190 additional babies. 

04/03/05
No deaths.  Still have 14 from first and 25 from second and 190 from third batch.  Feeding rotifers and fresh hatch brine on a continuous drip (1/8 teaspoon of brine eggs started the previous day plus 7 liters of approx 100ml/cc rotifers diluted in 5 gallons of salt water from the system with green water to feed the rotifers for the day)  None of the babies are making any effort to hold onto the mesh net in the tank

04/04/05 
No deaths.  none holding onto mesh.  I believe the new babies are eating the baby brine and the rotifers.  The first batch is eating mostly baby brine.
04/06/05
None died yesterday.  Six of the smallest ones dead today.  They are getting stuck on the outflow screen.  I set up a 10 gallon tank with a rigid airline tubing to raise baby brine.  One gallon jars would probably work better since I do not want a continuous culture.  I bought some nanochloropsis from Reed Mariculture to try to raise the baby brine on.  I plan on raising them in batch cultures to whatever size the babies can feed on.  We were unsuccessful in raising baby brine on our previous attempts.  If anyone has any suggestions please email us at aquatictec@aol.com
04/07/05
 Four more dead babies today.  Going to put a smaller hole on the tank fill to slow the water throughput and hopefully keep the babies from getting caught on the screen.  The larger fry could probably eat something much larger than fresh hatch brine shrimp.  I was thinking about using a larger tank to culture brine and keeping brine of different sizes together and straining out the size I need with different mesh sizes.  I am going to start a culture of live mysis next week.
04/08/05
Eeks- 10 deaths- put new fill nozzle to slow flow down water turnover
04/12/05
the bigger ones are all still alive.  There are about 40 of the last batch still alive. 
04/16/05
I set up our saltwater mysis culturing system consisting of 4 rows of 10 gallon tanks with 4 tanks per row.  There are approximately 100 mysis per tank.  They are all filtered with sponge filters for now.  The top 4 tanks contain the breeders.  The fry will be  siphoned out 2x daily into a lower tank.  Each week a new grow out tank will be started.  When the last grow out tank is filled, the first will be harvested and so on.  The adults are being fed fresh hatch enriched brine shrimp 2x daily.  The fry, when we get them, will be fed baby brine and rotifers if they will eat them.  The adults were not interested in the rotifers

05/08/2005

The mysis culture system is producing around 50 to 150 mysis per day. It takes a little over 1 hour to maintain.  We had a crisis with hydroids.  The baby seahorse tank was covered with them and they were eating the sea horses food as well as the seahorses.  We lost most all of the babies.  We now toothbrush the baby tank daily to keep the hydroids at bay.    I had 5 larger ones left.  I moved them to a 5 gallon tank with 3 erectus a customer gave us.  They are all eating the cultured mysis.

05/16/2005

Somehow one of the reidi managed to get out of the water and dry up.  The 3 erectus and the other larger reidi are all doing fine feeding on grown out brine shrimp and cultured live mysis shrimp.  We lost most all of the smaller babies to hydroids in our coral system. We had been scrubbing the sides of the culture tank but not the front glass. We had a batch today of 161 babies born today.  The mysis culture system is doing well.  The sponge filters in the adult tanks are getting dirty.  We have had moderate success growing out baby brine in a 10 gallon tank feeding larger species of micro algae whenever the water clears.  We use a 250 micron screen to screen out the larger brine and leave the babies.  I would like to try culturing copepods.  Does anyone have any success stories  on culturing them?

08/04/05

We had too many problems with hydroids on the tank in the coral system.  We put the last batch of reidi in a sterile 10 gallon tank with a sponge filter and they are about 1 month old now.  We have been keeping the s.g. rather low 1.017 to keep them off the surface.  It seems to be working.  Losses have been very minimal.  We just had our first batch of kuda babies today from the ones for sale above.  We only saved 5 from the skimmer.

8/12/05

Someone forgot to feed the baby seahorses last Sunday and today we paid the price.  The batch from 07/05 was doing stellar until today.  A lot of them were dead today.  They also started turning orange today, the ones that are left that is.  I noticed that in the sterile 10 gallon systems that the rotifers for whatever reason are all living and they are available for food all day long.  In the flow through system they disappeared quickly.  I also noticed that the growth rate is phenomenal on the new 10 gallon systems probably because the food is continuously available.  The batch from 07/05 are big enough to start on baby mysis shrimp.  Normally this would have taken 2 to 3 months.  Today we had 2 batches of H reidi.  One from mystery parents and one from our yellow parents.

12/18/2005

We had a major disaster a month or so back.  The larger sea horse tank broke overnight and we lost a few of the ponies and those that survived stopped breeding.  We had our first batch last week and they all died within a few hours.  We have been able to successfully raise a few from each batch with great regularity.  I do not think anything is going to change until we get a good food source in a size larger than fresh hatch brine shrimp and smaller than mysis shrimp.  

We are trying to culture the large species of copepods tigger pods from Reed Mariculture.  Has any one had any success with them?  

I saw very large copepods in an exhibit booth from Reed Mariculture, but the copepods they sent me were no where near that large.  We have had them for a few weeks now and they have not grown any larger. 

10/20/2009

Here we go again!  We got another pair of H. reidi a few months ago and they had their first batch.  We had approximately 20 to 30 babies.  They were transferred to a few quart acrylic tank within their parents tank.  The tank had 1/2" holes in the sides covered with a 250 micron mesh.  Rotifers were added to their container every 2 hours.  Shellfish diet was added to the water  to keep the rotifers fed.  The babies all died within 5 to 6 days.  I am thinking that they needed more water movement.  Next batch I will try putting them in a lower tank and having water from a higher tank drip into their container.

And It Starts Again

 05/02/2015

About 6 months ago we aquired 2 male and 2 female captive bred and raised H. kuda seahorses.  We also obtained several pairs of H. reidi but ended up with only 1 female.  We currently have 2 male and 2 female H. Kuda and a H reidi in a seperate tank

We had 100++ Kuda babies released on May 2nd, 2015. As of today May 15th we have about 16 left

http://youtu.be/YFoJn-SvTCs

The father was placed in a kreisel tank the day before birth and removed the day after.

The babies were fed fresh hatched enriched baby brine shrimp (fhebbs) from birth.
After the second day we added parvocalanus copepods and rotifers. The babies appeared to be eating the rotifers.
We had some significant losses to date which I attribute this to not giving them a small enough food to start with.

We have not had any losses for the last 3 days

In our previous attempts we had problems with hydroids so the tank is wiped down daily.

We haven't gotten there yet but we needed a larger food than fhebbs before and now we can grow brine shrimp to any size.

This is the first batch from these parents.
The babies have not started to hitch yet

05/18/2015

As of today the baby sea horses are still not hitching. They appear to have lost all interest in rotifers and are only eating enriched baby brine. The father is "pregnant" again.

05/22/2015
We haven't lost any
they are feeding on enriched fresh hatch baby brine and enriched (with iso) 1 week old brine shrimp
We will be transitioning them to older brine over the next few weeks
we will keep the tank tinted with iso to keep the brine fed
We have 2 more pregnant males

06/03/2015

We are down to 10 and they are all hitching. 

A few days ago one of the female H. kuda died for no apparent reason. 

We removed the bigger pieces of live rock from their tank. 

We will be moving the female reidi to the tank with the kudas. 

The 2 pregnant kuda males should be releasing soon. 

We will place their fry in a separate tank from last months batch and start them on enritched rotifers and copepods with some fhebbs. 

We will keep the water tinted with iso

08/23/2018 

It has been a while since we have provided any updates .  We have had many batches of seahorses come and go.  We are getting better.  We are in the process of setting up a new holding system for the brood stock.  It consists of a 74 gallon DB Rimless Edge Aquarium, with an Ecotech Radion XR15 G4 Pro light with a custom Zebra Wood stand and custom sump.  Filtration consists of a ceramic block, a Eshopps protein skimmer and a AT biopellet reactor.  There is a epoxy sand bottom and all the rock work is artificial,  The ceramic block was placed in another tank for a few weeks and then then transferred to the current tank.  Two pieces of frozen shrimp were added.  The water was tested for ammonia but it never showed up.  I guess the ceramic block cycled the tank.  The tank is running and waiting until we acquire some brood stock.

See our foods section for a variety of foods for your seahorses

Aquatictec@aol.com

We do not currently have any seahorses for sale.
These should be ready for sale around November 25th, 2024
let us know if you are interested