When found Lucy in a cooler full of peppermint shrimp. She was about the 2 inches long and red as the shrimp. It was late August and seahorse season in our area was just about done. When the cooler weather comes the seahorses migrate away from the areas where the shrimpers catch the seahorse. FYI the shrimping industry is the biggest source of wild caught seahorse, very few come from collectors. But that’s a another story…

This is “Lucy” after about a month in our tank. We just assumed that it was a female, since we never see males for sale. I think the wholesaler did not know that they had a seahorse in their shrimp cooler, so they sold it without thinking to much about it.
This is Lucy after 3 months. At this point we started to wounder if this was a male seahorse since we could not see the abdominal fin. The easiest way to tell male and female seahorses is the abdominal fin location. For the males the fin will be located high and the female’s fin is located right at the base of the tail.

At this point we knew Lucy was really a male seahorse, even though he does not have an abdominal fin. But you can see the male brood pouch starting to form.

Since this is a male saehorse we really could not keep the name Lucy, so we renamed him to Louis the man seahorse. Now that he as a brood pouch, he may begin courting one of the females. And how difficult would that be with a name like Lucy….