Passive acoustic monitoring of the short-snouted seahorse population of L’Espiguette 

Listening to seahorses to identify and locate them? That’s the challenge posed by the Biotope Business Foundation for Biodiversity with its partners – the association Peau-Bleue, the company Sensea and the Seaquarium of Le Grau du Roi – in setting up this project to monitor seahorse populations through passive acoustics. The population of short-snouted seahorses (Hippocampus hippocampus) found on the site of L’Espiguette in the Camargue region of the Gard department is one of the biggest in Europe, with an estimated 216 individuals. It’s a species that is protected by the Berne Convention and which appears on the I.U.C.N. Red List.
H_hippocampus_F_©Patrick_Louisy_DSC_7650
Since 2014, that dense colony, called year-round sedentary, has been disappearing from the area and seems to leave the site in spring and return at the end of the summer or the beginning of autumn. If the project team manages to characterise the sounds that the seahorses emit or perceive, first in an aquarium, and then on site, it will be able to determine their presence or absence in an area, validate the theory of their disappearance and their migration, identify their routes and their movements, find out whether anthropogenic noise disturbs them, and finally locate the areas where the seahorses live. In the long term, this innovative project aims to assess the usefulness and effectiveness of this type of method for the conservation of the colony. 
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DREAL Occitanie
Peau-Bleue
Sensea
Seaquarium du Grau du Roi et Institut Marin

2020

Gard (France)