Why this is a horse of a different colour

ANOTHER LIFE: Among the marine bric-a-brac that has followed me around for half a lifetime is a dried Pacific seahorse, its colour faded to a nondescript, horny brown, the spiralling curl of its long tail unnaturally stiff and straight. I bought it in a shell-shop on San Francisco Bay (tut, tut!) and as a curio it has hypnotised the most fractious of visiting children.

News of Ireland's first commercial seahorse farm, in the Connemara Gaeltacht, has left me with mixed feelings.

Seahorses, the Hippocampus species, are, after all, just fishes with prehensile tails that human beings happen to find strangely beautiful and quite moving in their marital behaviour. Their numerous close relatives in the Syngnathidae family, pipefish with horsey snouts but horizontal swimming habits, command no such human audience.

There is no rational reason, therefore, why seahorse farming should seem of any greater ethical consequence than farming haddock or halibut, both of which offer comparable technical challenges.

Selling tank-reared seahorses to aquariums makes the best prices, relieves pressure on the wild species and helps to interest more people in marine conservation.

Selling them by the tonne to the Chinese medicine industry (a longer-term ambition of the new Carna company) might also seem a strategy that actually conserves Hippocampus in the wild.

According to Kealan Doyle, the entrepreneurial scientist at the helm of Eachuisce Eireann Teo, the Pacific seahorse trade involves 40 million individuals annually, and an export from Ireland could help to spare wild stocks.

He hopes to make the seahorse an icon for marine conservation in Ireland: there are two rarely-encountered species in our offshore waters.

But his project has prompted reservations on the website of the Marine Work Group of the Friends of the Irish Environment (www.mwg.utvinternet.com).

Here, marine ecologist Andy Scollick posts a report (in the name of the Friends of Irish Seahorses (FISH)) recording his "great sadness" in learning of the Gaeltacht project and setting out some of the complexities of the international seahorse trade. CITES, the convention on trade in endangered wildlife species, will this month weigh up the options in seahorse conservation. The impact of farming on prices and the behaviour of poor fishing communities in the Pacific must be weighed against strategies for education to cut down market demand.

Meanwhile, Scollick is concerned for Hippocampus welfare.

"Seahorses," he reminds us, "are monogamous, staying with one partner season after season. They meet each morning to reinforce their pair bonding with an elaborate greeting ritual. The female meets the male in his territory and they both change colour, and promenade and pirouette together. This dance lasts from several minutes to up to an hour."

How, he asks, will the Carna company avoid splitting up a pair thus bonded? This unfamiliar perspective on what is, after all, "just" a fish, catches the spirit of Ireland's first marine conservation lobby. Whales, dolphins and seals all have active Irish groups, but ocean ecology and marine wildlife in general have lacked the kind of science-based NGO advocacy that has been lavished on the habitats and species of the countryside.

Another marine animal of current concern to the FIE work-group, for example, is the prickly purple sea-urchin, Paracentrotus lividus, now overfished to virtual extinction in many west-coast pools. The Marine Institute has documented the rapid decline in landings, from a peak of 375 tonnes in 1976 (perhaps 14 million individual urchins) to less than one tonne in 2000. The stocks are now in a "critical condition", echoing what has happened in the uncontrolled dredging of razorfish at some points on the east coast.

While a general ban exists on diving for shellfish, there is no regulation of urchin harvesting from intertidal pools.

The Marine Institute has urged proper management and tighter controls, but the Marine Work Group is lobbying the Government for an immediate harvesting ban and a managed recovery of the species in which licences are backed up by Environmental Impact Statements.

Meanwhile, trials continue (also at Carna in Connemara) of hatchery techniques to farm sea urchins at densities of up to 20 kilos per square metre.

The activism of small and (one trusts) expert groups has become a feature of today's environmentalism, quite different from that of broadly-based membership organisations such as the Marine Conservation Society of the UK, which take time and resources to build. The EU Commission, and bodies such as OSPAR, the inter-governmental watchdog on the environment of the North-east Atlantic, offer a framework within which NGO lobbyists can coax or embarrass national governments into greater effort.

For example, in the national ocean policy for which the FIE/MWG will soon be campaigning, the Government would commit itself to OSPAR's ambition for a network of marine protected areas.

But given that the Taoiseach recently came within a shrimp's whisker of dropping the word "Marine" from the name of the relevant department, there could still be a long haul ahead.