Sea Horse

There are a lot of opinions on keeping seahorses, but the majority of successful ones have found (usually at the expense of the lives of seahorses) that the odds are much much greater when certain conditions are adhered to.
First, buy tank bred, tank raised captive bred seahorses.
Net pen raised are referred to as captive bred by many sellers, but really, the only advantage they have over wild caught is that they have been trained to eat frozen mysis. They still carry more pathogens than tank bred, tank raised horses.
Seahorses are VERY susceptible to bacterial outbreaks like vibrio.
While the seahorses many times found in warmer temperatures in natural habitat, the bacteria counts in a tank are much more concentrated so they are affected much more than in the wild.
Bacteria grow much faster as the temperatures rise and seahorse keepers have found that 74° F seems to be the upper limit that more consistantly helps to prevent the bacterial outbreaks.
(The first recommendation when something goes wrong with a seahorse is to lower the temperature to 68° F)
There are almost 40 kinds of seahorses but in the hobby only a certain few are usually found, with sometimes the area you live being a determining factor.
For small aquariums, H. Zostera can be kept, but they need to be fed BBS daily as they will not eat frozen or prepared foods.
A common horse that sometimes might be kept in a 20g tall would be a pair (no more) of H. Fuscus.
Pretty well any other kind requires a minimum 30g tall or hex and larger.
Some types of seahorse are harder to keep than others, like the Kelloggi previously mentioned. They are seldom tank bred/raised, get very large, and mortality rate is significant.
There are keepers who maintain seahorses in other than optimal conditions but from my years of reading, they are in the minority.
Be sure that when you see a recommendation of any kind for keeping seahorses, that it is a "majority" recommendation, not a "minority" one.
It's the seahorses that pay when things don't work out.
No one post, nor even one thread can explain all that one needs to know, so a lot of research needs to be done and my preferred site for that is seahorse.org.

 

Agreed. There is one other site but it escapes me at the moment.

 

That would probably be syngnathid.org.

 

Bingo. Thanks