Sitting in the back of a ‘Honolulu blue’ open-topped Land Rover, we turn heads as we drive through the potholed streets of Vilanculos, a small coastal town in Mozambique.
As we reach the outskirts, the tarmac turns to sand, and local lodge owner Mike van Hone swerves to avoid a lean village dog that bursts from the shade of a mango tree.
We’re heading south, to a community-run seahorse project at the fishing village of Mangalisse.
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The seahorse trade
Just a few years ago, the seagrass beds off Mangalisse were being systematically stripped of seahorses. Fishermen were being approached by traffickers linked to the trade in traditional Chinese medicine.
They were being paid between 25 and 50 Mozambican meticais (30p to 60p) for each dried seahorse, a high price relative to local incomes. The fishermen began referring to the seahorses as ‘diamonds’, and thousands started to be pulled from the water.
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“Seahorses first appear in Chinese medical literature around AD700, though their use probably goes back much further,” says Lixing Lao, president of the Virginia University of Integrative Medicine, USA.
“Mixed with herbs and drunk as a tea, dried seahorse is most commonly used in traditional medicine to treat asthma and male impotence.”
Lao goes on to say that there is no scientific evidence to support efficacy, as no clinical trials have ever been carried out.
Ko Shing Street, in Hong Kong’s traditional medicine market, is known as Medicine Street. Here, dried seahorses retail for up to HK$40 (about £3.80) each, 10 times the price the fishermen in Mozambique were being paid.
In 2002, all seahorse species were listed under CITES Appendix II, meaning they can only be exported if sourced sustainably and legally, and if there is paperwork to prove it.
Most countries that previously exported large numbers of seahorses, including Thailand, India, China, Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia, subsequently chose to ban exports or had bans imposed on them by CITES.
Approximately 98 per cent of seahorses previously found in the global trade originated from these countries, meaning both exports and imports should predominantly have ceased.
Sadly, these efforts have not saved seahorses. Instead, the bans have created a black market.
“We found that 95 per cent of dried seahorses in Hong Kong’s large market were being imported from source countries that had export bans in place,” says Ting-Chun Kuo, from Project Seahorse at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, in Canada.
Mozambique's seahorses
Three seahorse species have been recorded in the waters off Mozambique: giraffe, common and thorny. While the species are legally protected in Mozambique, enforcement is difficult in remote coastal areas. Small and non-perishable, dried seahorses are easily smuggled across borders.
Back at the coast, we splash our way, barefoot, across the sand and mudflats, avoiding the sharp young mangrove saplings. Clambering aboard a dhow – a small, traditional, hand-built wooden sailing boat – we slip away from the shore. The boat’s patched lateen sail is heavy with damp air and the promise of rain.
The sea is calm but the air is chilly, and we crouch in the bottom of the boat, sheltering from the wind. At the bow, a man stands barefoot, scanning the water intently. At the stern, another man steers, guiding the boat through the maze of sandbanks and seagrass beds that form one of Mozambique’s most productive and fragile marine ecosystems.
The dhow drifts to a halt. Our guide, Ilídio Cole, steps over the side and into the knee-deep water, gesturing for us to put on our masks and follow. The seagrass sways gently, moving like ribbons in the current.
Cole moves with great care, parting the seagrass gently with his hands. He stops and points. At first, I can see nothing. It takes a while to focus, and then I see it.
A tiny shape, like a question mark, is curled around a blade of grass. It’s a seahorse, perfectly still, and no longer than my little finger. Further searching reveals more, some golden, others a dusty rust colour, some curved like musical notes, others camouflaged in pale browns.
We don’t touch them. We just watch, floating in silence, aware how easily we could have missed them, and how easily a world like this could be erased without anyone noticing.
As Cole explains, these special little creatures don’t travel far. They are not strong swimmers. Most seahorses live their entire lives within in a single patch of seagrass, tethered to their territory, as vulnerable as they are rare.
Most are monogamous, with some species mating for life. Searching for a mate can be a challenge for a seahorse, given that they are found in such low densities and rely on camouflage to hide from predators. Once they’ve found a mate, they tend to stick together.
After a seahorse partnership is formed, it is maintained through a wonderful daily ritual. Greeting each other every morning, the couple will promenade and pirouette together for several minutes, in a dance that can even involve changing colour, before separating for the rest of the day. The purpose of this routine is to confirm the other partner is still alive, to reinforce their bond and to synchronise breeding.
In the seahorse world it is the male that carries the eggs, nurturing them in a brood pouch, a unique internal structure that functions much like a mammalian placenta, supplying nutrients and oxygen to the developing embryos.
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After fertilisation, the embryos will develop for around two weeks before dozens, sometimes hundreds, of tiny, fully formed seahorse fry are expelled into the water. Left to fend for themselves, few will survive.
Seahorses compensate for this vulnerability with reproductive commitment and extreme site fidelity, traits that make them both fascinating and perilously easy to exploit.
Elevating local voices
Just a few years ago, seahorses were being extracted in alarming numbers from these waters, worth far more dead than alive. The economics were devastatingly simple.
It takes roughly 700–800 dried seahorses to make a kilogram. For that kilogram, fishermen were paid the equivalent of around US$240 (£180), about $1 for every three seahorses removed from the sea. At that rate, the outcome was inevitable.
Within a decade, there would be no seahorses left, no income to replace them, and irreparable damage would have been inflicted upon an ecosystem that sustains fisheries, tourism and coastal protection. Into this complex socio-ecological landscape stepped ParCo, addressing the challenge not by imposing external solutions, but by elevating local voices and leadership.
ParCo, short for Parceiros Comunitários (Community Partners), was founded in 2018 by our guide, Ilídio Cole, a local fisherman who now holds a degree from Eduardo Mondlane School of Rural Development, where he wrote his thesis on sustainable fishing, and Juliet Lyon, an international development specialist who had moved to Vilanculos as a Peace Corps volunteer in 2004, after graduating from the University of Chicago, USA.
Cole and Lyon’s shared concern for the environment, coupled with a belief that solutions should be led by those most affected, became the foundation of the organisation. What initially began as a grassroots response to a community meeting about plastic waste on beaches soon evolved into an organisation that championed ‘seahorse solutions’.
Shocked by the scale of seahorse extraction and the speed at which it was unfolding, Lyon began meeting with local fishermen to better understand the trade. It quickly became clear that enforcement alone would not solve the problem. What was needed was awareness, ownership and a viable alternative.
“When we launched the campaign, the young guys in the meeting were telling us, ‘We won’t stop, the seahorses are our diamonds, we are building our houses with them,’” recalls Lyon.
Parco’s approach to seahorse conservation was deliberately holistic. Alongside education about the biology and legal status of seahorses, they worked to create an economic model in which living seahorses would be worth more than dead ones.
Community-led ecotourism
A pivotal moment came soon after the campaign’s launch. Local police intercepted a shipment of 1,782 dried seahorses being trafficked out of Mangalisse village. This wasn’t just a win for enforcement, it was a wake-up call for the community.
Notebooks seized during the raid listed the names and phone numbers of all involved. The traffickers were jailed and their families were warned. Suddenly, the risk of poaching was no longer abstract.
“The police called everyone on that list and warned them,” says Lyon. “After that, the community called us back and asked us to explain our ideas again.”
But arrests alone do not build stewardship and, without viable alternatives, many would return to old habits. Recognising this, ParCo focused on creating incentives for seahorse protection. The cornerstone of this strategy? Community-led, seahorse-focused ecotourism.
Drawing on Vilanculos as an established tourist destination and gateway to the Bazaruto Archipelago, ParCo’s alternative began to take off. Former poachers became guides, using their knowledge of the sea to take tourists out on traditional dhows to snorkel with the seahorses.
The initiative, now known as Indigo Seahorse Adventure, named after the local Xitswa word for seahorse, is entirely community-run. Fishermen who were once paid to extract seahorses were now earning income by ensuring their survival.
Crucially, most of the revenue flows directly back into the community, providing an economic incentive for their conservation.
“They’ve done more than 100 tours now,” says Lyon. “The initiative really benefits the community. It even supplies a social fund for families who run into problems, for funerals, houses burning down, medical emergencies. Everyone supports the project because everyone benefits from it.”
“Before, seahorses were only seen as something you could sell,” adds Cole. “Now, the community sees them as something worth protecting. The same fishermen who once collected them are now the ones making sure they are not touched.”
The ecological impact is obvious. Where once only a handful of seahorses might be spotted on a good day, sightings have increased dramatically.
“In an hour of snorkelling we used to see two or three,” says Lyon. “Now we see more than 10 on almost every tour. We can see the population rebounding.”
From ‘diamonds’ destined for the traditional medicine trade to ambassadors of the sea, the seahorses off the coast of Vilanculos are thriving, not simply because of science or policy, but because a community chose to protect them.
While their future remains uncertain in a rapidly changing ocean, it’s brighter than it was just a few years ago.
Top image: a green seahorse hiding in the sea grass in Mozambique. Credit: Madelein_Wolf/Getty Images
