This week we go back twenty years and two weeks, to see one of the many species that I collected and kept in the saltwater aquarium briefly to get a few detail pics. This is a gulf pipefish (Syngnathus scovelli,) a close relative of sea horses as you might have guessed, and pretty common in the Indian River Lagoon near where I used to live, this being Florida. I’m not exactly sure this was my first encounter, but I recall grabbing a handful of weeds to feed the other occupants of the aquarium and finding something wriggling within. [As a side note, nothing actually ate the weeds, seen in the background here, but instead fed upon the algae, isopods, and organic debris collected within.] Generally in the range of 80-100mm in length and slow swimmers, pipefish rely more on staying hidden and camouflaging themselves, and they were extremely good at this in the particular area that I was finding them, because it was near several longneedle pine trees that overhung the water. The needles themselves are all attached to a common base stem off of the branches, and when the needles were gone the bare stems (that would detach themselves from the trees and fall into the water,) looked exactly like a pipefish, or vice versa. I couldn’t tell you how many times I was snorkeling and thought, Ah, another pipefish – no, forget it, that’s just one of those damn pine stems, as well as a couple of times saying to myself, Another pine stem – no, wait, that IS a pipefish.
I could never keep these guys long in the aquarium, because it never carried their preferred food – except once. One of the grass shrimp had produced young, a cloud of them drifting through the water no more than 2mm in length, and two pipefish were knocking those down like popcorn, more animated than I’d ever seen them. I managed to capture one of the newborn shrimp for detailed macro photos, which was a challenge in itself (I’ve improved a bit since then,) but the tank was devoid of the shrimplings within an hour.
By the way, the pale pancake-like fins seen in the image at top are actually egg cases for the kings crown conchs, though I never saw these hatch out. But also in there is a small, unidentified crab, right among the conch eggs and tucked neatly within the curve of the pipefish’s body – all you can really see is a mottled grey thing, though if you look very closely you’ll make out a couple legs at top of the blob. The crabs and the pipefish ignored one another and lived in quiet harmony within the tank, as did most of the denizens. The kings crown conchs, however, were rapacious carnivorous snails that fed on other snail species and could scour the tank clean of such within days, so they never stayed long either.