Taking photographs and detailed notes, two divers swim through turbid water to spot the male in the crevice and a nearby female, both hanging on in a once-pristine habitat turned to withered coral beds and ragged remnants of seagrass meadows. "The seahorse faces an enormous variety of threats," says Paul Ferber, a British conservationist who has lived on Ach Seh Island for three years, studying the genus Hippocampus and trying to protect its ravaged environment against an armada of illegal trawlers, crab traps and divers in sleek longboats specifically targeting seahorses and related species. Peering into the darkness one night, Ferber hears the tell-tale chugging of his No. 1 enemy: trawlers from neighboring Vietnam dragging miles-long nets with mesh so fine that even creatures smaller than seahorses can't escape. A powerfully built man with a pair of seahorses tattooed on his chest, Ferber urgently calls his contact in the Cambodian fisheries department, hoping its speedboat can rush from the mainland to arrest the intruders. Neither their unique look and behavior (the male, for example, gives birth to the young) nor their place in popular imagination (as charioteers for the Greek god Poseidon, or powerful sea dragons of Chinese myth) seems to have prevented massive exploitation. In Chinese traditional medicine, seahorses ground into powder or dried and eaten whole are believed to cure everything from kidney disease to baldness, despite a lack of scientific evidence. On Ach Seh Island, he has built a rudimentary station and quarters for his Thai wife, five children, staff, young volunteers and visiting marine biologists, all living together communal-style. Ferber praises supportive officials in Phnom Penh and within the local fisheries department, but alleges corruption among police and some local government officials tasked with protecting the marine environment.
 |
| READ THE ORIGINAL POST AT www.sfgate.com |
