Is the hippocampus a mammal?

May-August is the breeding season of hippocampus every year. In the meantime, mother hippocampus laid her eggs in the pouch of father hippocampus. After 50-60 days, the young fish will be born from the father's pouch, so the father is responsible for parenting. Although dad doesn't really have children, he still has to hatch. Dad's pouch only acts as an incubator, and the eggs still come from mom.

Hippocampus (Latin name: Hippocampus) is the general name of several small warm marine fishes in Syngnathidae. It is a small marine animal with a body length of 5 ~ 30 cm. Named after the head bends at right angles to the body, the head is horsehead-shaped, at an angle to the body shape, with a long tubular snout, a small mouth and dorsal fins, all of which are composed of fins. The eyes can move independently.

Hippocampus moves slowly, but it can effectively capture fast-moving and hidden copepods, which are distributed in the Atlantic Ocean, Europe, Pacific Ocean and Australia.

Morphological characteristics:

The head of the hippocampus is flat, with two nostrils on each side of the head. The head is bent at right angles to the body, and the fish is thick and flat, completely enclosed in the bone ring. The tip of the mouth is tubular, so it can't be opened and closed. It can only suck small animals in the water as food, and its eyes can rotate up and down, left and right, back and forth respectively. The chest and abdomen are prominent, and the trunk is composed of 10 ~ 12 bone ring, with a general body length of about 15 ~ 30 cm. The tail is slender and has four corners, and the tail tip can be curled and often curled; The head bends at an obtuse or right angle to the trunk.

There is a protruding crown at the top and a short tip at the crown end; Kiss is tubular; Small mouth, end position; Small branchial foramen; The whole body is completely wrapped by membranous bone, the dorsal fin is spineless, and there are no ventral fins and caudal fins. Dorsal fin is located between trunk and tail; Short gluteal fin; Thoracic fin developed; No caudal fin; Its fins are not easy to see with the naked eye. But with high-speed photography and careful observation, you can see moving thorns.

These spines can move back and forth 70 times in one second. According to the wave from one end of the dorsal fin to the other, the hippocampus can ride this wave freely back and forth or up and down. The male fish has a pouch on the ventral side of the tail, in which the eggs hatch and can reproduce for 2-3 generations a year.

Habits of hippocampus:

Because of its mimicry adaptability, hippocampus has a special habit, and it likes to live in the subtidal waters where algae or seaweed breed. Sex is lazy, often winding its curly tail around the stems and branches of seaweed, and sometimes hanging upside down on floating seaweed or other objects, drifting with the flow.

Even if you temporarily leave the entanglement because of eating or other reasons, after swimming for a certain distance, you find other objects attached to it. The swimming posture of hippocampus is very beautiful. Fish stand upright in the water and swim slowly by means of high-frequency fluctuation of dorsal fin and pectoral fin (10 times per second).