I've had both WC and CB and had good and bad experiences with both. CB seahorses can go off eating when shipped like was said before, I found a small power head moving frozen mysis around the bottom often would get them to take some food and once you get them to start they learn quick.

Seahorses can be very tempermental, put a lot of research into what you are considering and for starters I'd stick with H. Kuda (black kudas) or go into dwarfs as they tend to take to brine shrimp.

I've been looking for a breeder in Canada and haven't found anyone yet but for a price one of the pet stores will order some in for you. Right now J&L has some H. Redei but the price is (wow) $180 each. They had some tiny kuda's but they were very expensive as well.

Doug

We had our seahorses for close to a year..when we first bought them from the petstore we thought the pair had no chance of survival since they werent eating
at all in the start. We kept feeding mysis shrimp and eventually they starting eating it and were thriving. Many many batch of young babies all the time even got a couple to reach about an inch or 2! but then we had problems with feeding them and the baby ponies eventually died. We decided to get another seahorse a yellowish one (pair were black) dont remember names..but that one quickly died due to not eating anything! I must say though its really neat whatching the young burst out of the males pouch and a cloud of babies swimming around. Been about 2 yrs since i had some again but its definitely something i will use my 50g breeder for in the future :biggrin: after my 90g reef. Only thing i found hard about seahorses was being able to get them to eat.. once you got them eating i found its pretty simple. You should definitely give it a try though its well worth it.

It looks like a small sample size but over 50% one-year survival for both captive-bred and wild caught seahorses. I wonder what their survival in nature is.

Now that some more time has passed it looks like more than half the wild-caught seahorse died before one year, and more than half of the captive-bred seahorses died within a year also. Either that or there are some poll respondents who have seahorses which are still alive, but have had them for less than one year.