---
title: Seahorses (Hippocampus)
scientific_name: Hippocampus
common_name: Seahorses
rank: Genus
published: 2024-11-19T18:41:51.573Z
updated: 2026-08-23T21:43:03.415Z
tags: Seahorses, Hippocampus, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/seahorses
---

# Seahorses (*Hippocampus*)

## Quick facts

- **Rank:** Genus
- **Scientific name:** Hippocampus
- **Body shape:** Irregular - No standard fish outline - seahorses, frogfishes, ghost pipefishes.
- **Species listed here:** 4

## How to recognise this group

- distinct horse-like head and neck
- rigid body in upright, vertical posture
- body encased in segmented bony plates
- curled, prehensile tail used for clinging
- often with skin filaments or spines for camouflage

The male gets pregnant, and that is not a loose way of putting it. The female passes her eggs into a pouch on his belly and the pouch closes over them, and what follows is not storage. The pouch wall thickens and fills with blood vessels that deliver oxygen to the embryos and carry their waste away. The fluid inside is shifted across the pregnancy from something close to his own body fluid toward plain seawater, so the young are already matched to the sea before they meet it. His immune system has to be talked out of attacking tissue that is only half his. Birth is muscular and looks like work: hours of pumping, then the brood fired out in bursts.

The rest of the animal is a set of trades that make that possible. A seahorse has no tail fin. In every other fish the tail is the engine, and this one spent its engine on a hand: the tail tapers into a grip that wraps a seagrass blade, a gorgonian branch or a hydroid stem and holds, and in cross section it is square rather than round, which both grips better and survives being crushed better. What is left to swim with is a small fin on the back, so a seahorse travels upright at walking pace and would lose a race with almost anything in this sea. It does not need to win one. It is anchored.

Feeding is the one fast thing it does. The head sits at an angle to the body on what amounts to a neck, and it works as a spring: the head snaps up and forward, the snout sucks, and a copepod is inside the fish before the strike has registered. The range is a couple of centimeters. That is why a seahorse hunts by holding a spot where food comes to it rather than by going out to look.

Four species are listed for this sea and none of them is easy to find. The ones with real records here live in seagrass and rubble in shallow, unglamorous places, and the smallest is the size of a fingernail, known from a handful of sightings on deep soft coral. Seahorses everywhere are collected for dried medicine, curios and aquariums in volumes large enough that every species in the genus is listed under CITES. If a guide shows you one, note the spot and leave the animal where it is holding.


## Species (4)

- [Egyptian Seahorse (Hippocampus suezensis)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/seahorses/egyptian-seahorse)
- [Jayakar's Seahorse (Hippocampus jayakari)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/seahorses/jayakars-seahorse)
- [Softcoral Seahorse (Hippocampus debelius)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/seahorses/softcoral-seahorse)
- [Spotted Seahorse (Hippocampus kuda)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/seahorses/spotted-seahorse)

---

*Source: [Red Sea Creatures](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/seahorses)*
*Updated: August 23, 2026*