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Seahorses are a group (genus Hippocampus) of small fish belonging to the family Syngnathidae, which also includes pipefish and sea dragons. These creatures are named for the shape of their head, which looks like the head of a horse.They are found in shallow tropical and temperate waters throughout the world.Unlike most other fish, seahorses are monogamous and mate for life. Pygmy seahorses of the genus Hippocampus are diminutive in size (0.5-1 inch, or 1.36-2.6 cm, long).They live in close association with octocorals, colonial hydrozoans, bryozoans, seagrass and algae.They are morphologically distinct from the more numerous and larger species (0.9-14 inches,...

Millions of Years of Evolution Equal Engineering? by Brian Thomas, M.S. * Increasing numbers of innovative researchers borrow from biology when they examine and incorporate living systems into man-made designs. We know how man-made designs originate— people design them. But what about living designs? Two recent biomimicry research programs let slip major logic errors when accounting for the origin of the creatures they copy: the seahorse and kangaroo. In a video posted online about a year ago, researchers led by the University of California's Joanna McKittrick were seen mimicking the seahorse tail's expert balance between flexibility and rigidity in their...

"Spectacular find" includes gold, jewels, and a small army of likely sacrifices. Newfound tombs in Central America are yielding thousand-year-old gold, gems, and even hints of murder by pufferfish. But the real treasure is the excavation's clues to the unnamed civilization of the so-called golden chiefs of Panama, archaeologists say. "It's really a very spectacular find. ... probably the most significant" for this culture since the 1930s, when the nearby Sitio Conte site, also in central Panama, yielded a wealth of gold artifacts, anthropologist John Hoopes said. Until now, Sitio Conte provided the only major evidence of the golden-chiefs culture,...

Seahorses are truly unique, and not just because of their unusual equine shape. Unlike most other fish, they are monogamous and mate for life. Rarer still, they are among the only animal species on Earth in which the male bears the unborn young. Found in shallow tropical and temperate waters throughout the world, these upright-swimming relatives of the pipefish can range in size from 0.6 inches (1.5 centimeters) to 14 inches (35 centimeters) long. Male seahorses are equipped with a brood pouch on their ventral, or front-facing, side. When mating, the female deposits her eggs into his pouch, and the...

The Walea pygmy seahorse is one of five species named in a flurry of recent seahorse discoveries from coral reefs in the Red Sea and Indonesia. All five are less than an inch tall (2.5 centimeters) and are among the tiniest known vertebrates.

MARINE CORPS AIR STATION NEW RIVER, N.C. (March 8, 2006) -- During the early 1960’s, when Marines needed transportation to or from combat zones, they didn’t call in MV-22’s. For the Marines on the frontlines in Vietnam, their savior was the UH-34D, ancestor of the CH-46E and the MV-22. At the stand-up ceremony for Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron-263, the first operational MV-22 Osprey squadron, Marines from the Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron-361 Veterans Association displayed a piece of the squadron’s past, a static display of a fully restored, operational UH-34D. The UH-34D was flown by HMM-361 along with other Marine squadrons...