The British Seahorse Survey is run by The Seahorse Trust. It is partly funded by and in partnership with English Nature, PADI Project Aware, Marine Conservation Society, Care For the Wild International, Ocean Pulse, Seahorse Ireland, Project Seahorse and Divers Down and through kind donations from the public. It has been set up to look for and plot the populations of the two indigenous Seahorses around the British Isles and Ireland.

The survey has been running since 1994 and was set up to look for and monitor the populations of Seahorses around the British Isles and Ireland. This information will be used to form the basis of legal protection and conservation strategies for these highly vulnerable and environmentally sensitive animals.

We started searching for Seahorses through historic sightings in books and databases and this gave us locations of where to look for Seahorses. We have also had numerous wildlife trusts and other conservation bodies send us their records. With all this combined information we started to build up a picture of distribution and through public awareness contemporary sightings started to come in. This started to speed up and we had a huge influx of sightings (see graph 1) from 1994 until now. This doesn’t mean there are more Seahorses just that more people are looking and know where to report the sightings to.

It has long been supposed that both of our species of Seahorse, The Spiny (Hippocampus guttulatus) and The Short Snouted (Hippocampus hippocampus) were only seasonal visitors to the British Isles and Ireland but results so far from the survey show that they are indeed indigenous to our waters and occupy areas ranging all around Ireland and from the Shetland Isles down the west coast to the Isles of Scilly and then along the south coast to Kent with some historic sightings in Norfolk. The longer the survey runs and the more that is put into it will allow us to build a better picture.

We have only been able to run the survey by the kindness of others, through a voluntary network that is overseen by regional co-ordinators (fig1.)

Fig.1. Regional Co-ordinators

We have had sightings from all around the British Isles and some have come from surprising sources such as a small boy rockpooling in Torbay to an old fisherman in Caithness who remembered boyhood memories of lots of Seahorses in his local rockpools. The majority of our sightings come from divers and crab fishermen and both these groups have found seahorses through their activities. As awareness has grown sightings of seahorses have shot up. (see graph 1) This has allowed us to gather more information about one of the British Isles most enigmatic species.

Graph 1. British Seahorse Sightings between 1821 and 2004

If you come across a seahorse then let us know, fill in the survey form on this web site and e-mail it back to us or print it off and post it to The British Seahorse Survey. C/o The Seahorse Trust. 36 Greatwood Terrace, Topsham. Devon. EX3 0EB.

You can support the work of The Seahorse Trust and the British Seahorse Survey by making a donation through the donation page or better still set up a bankers order using the bankers order form. If you are a UK taxpayer if you sign the gift aid declaration we can claim some of your tax (28p in the pound) back from the government. It will not cost you a penny but make a world of difference to us.

The Seahorse Trust working in partnership with nature.