In Brazil, the Seahorse Black Market Is Bustling [View all]

Patagonian seahorses are a protected species in Brazil. Still, millions of them wind their way to the black market every year. Photo by Andrew J. Martinez/Science Photo Library

Every year, the country’s fishers accidentally catch millions of seahorses. Where they all go, nobody quite knows.
by Marina Wang
January 25, 2024 | 450 words, about 2 minutes

From São Paulo to Macaé, Brazil’s southern coast is flush with fishing vessels. As many as 3,700 bottom trawlers ply the region in search of fish and shrimp. All too often, however, hidden away at the bottom of bulging nets, fishers find Patagonian seahorses, a protected species that lives almost nowhere else.

Researchers have long suspected that southern Brazil is a hotbed for seahorse bycatch, and in a new study, scientists calculate the full size of the problem.

Led by Rosana Silveira, a seahorse researcher with Brazil’s nongovernmental Hippocampus Institute, scientists monitored the catches from five fishing boats between 2016 and 2018. On average, each of these boats pulled up six seahorses every day.

Six seahorses a day doesn’t sound like much, says Sarah Foster, a seahorse expert at the University of British Columbia who wasn’t involved in the study. But extrapolating from five boats to the thousands that make up Brazil’s fleet, she says, yields a much more striking toll—roughly 2.3 million seahorses every year. That’s nearly 10,000 tonnes of tiny seahorses or roughly the weight of 100 blue whales. Fishers are then selling these incidentally caught seahorses, which are sometimes injured or dead, on the black market.

The vast majority of the global seahorse trade winds up dried and used for traditional Chinese medicine, says Foster, and a fraction goes to the aquarium trade. The Brazilian bycatch, however, mostly stays in the country, Silveira says. There, it feeds a clandestine market for curios, folk remedies, and talismans used in Afro-Brazilian religions.

More:
https://hakaimagazine.com/news/in-brazil-the-seahorse-black-market-is-bustling/