How the aquarium trade and traditional medicine harvest cause significant seahorse welfare harm and population decline.
Seahorse welfare in the aquarium trade involves significant acute suffering from capture stress and prolonged suffering from starvation in inadequate aquarium environments. Wild-caught seahorses cannot typically adapt to frozen food or pellets — they require live copepods and mysid shrimp at feeding frequencies that standard aquarium practice does not provide. Mortality rates of 80-90% in the first year for wild-caught seahorses indicate severe and widespread welfare harm in the trade. Captive-bred seahorses, adapted to aquarium conditions and trained to accept frozen food, show far better welfare outcomes and should be the only source for any aquarium keeping.