"I've had favourites," Amanda Vincent confesses. "James, who has the world record for babies: 1,572 at one time! And one tagged Male #85, who lived in the Sydney harbour and would only attach himself to discarded lawn sprinklers." McGill's newest biology professor recalls her seahorses fondly.

In her McGill office, Amanda Vincent displays a dried seahorse.

With its equine head, upright carriage, overlapping plates and prehensile tail, it is easy to see why the ancient Greeks regarded the seahorse as a minuscule sea monster used by Neptune to pull his chariots. The seahorse also boasts one of the animal kingdom's most distinctive baby-making arrangements: the male becomes pregnant. The female produces the eggs (thereby proving that she is, in fact, the female) but deposits them in the male's pouch, where he fertilizes them (the "male" function in procreation). "James's babies came from a pouch with a half-tablespoon capacity," marvels Vincent, "but if you laid the babies out end to end, they would reach 11 metres."

Vincent, at 36, is the world authority on seahorse conservation. She arrived at McGill from Oxford last October, after being vigorously recruited. "We had the candidates teach a class in addition to giving a department seminar," explains Donald Kramer, Chair of Biology, "and we formally considered student opinions. The students found her integration of academic research and practical environmental problems stimulating, even charismatic." McGill pursued her vigorously, offering a teaching load of one course per year to entice the zoologist turned activist to Montreal.

Enter Vincent's office on the fourth floor of the Stewart Biology Building and you are surrounded by images and artifacts representing seahorses. For Vincent, Hippocampus, as scientists know the seahorse (the name means "horse-worm" or "horse-monster," depending on the translator), is not simply her object of study. It is a passion. "They can be so elegant, so beautiful," she confesses. The fish is a charmer, all right. But it isn't just another pretty, albeit fishy, face.

Seahorses are also big money. With dried seahorse selling for up to US$1,200 a kilo in Hong Kong recently, the price is as contingent on supply and demand as prices for any Wall Street commodity - and seahorse demand always outstrips supply. The known legal traffic in dead seahorses amounts to more than 50 tonnes annually, or about 20 million seahorses; aquariums and collectors take another 500,000 to 1 million seahorses from the seas. The trade supports entire communities in the Philippines and Vietnam.

Amanda Vincent on the island of Palawan in the Philippines, en route to the seahorse ranch.

"We don't know what the world seahorse population is," Vincent laments. "But if you're taking 20 million seahorses a year, you have to be having some effect." Sure enough, subsistence fishers have commented on dwindling populations and smaller individuals -- no surprise to Vincent. The population decline also reflects the state of the sea: pollution, dredging and dumping threaten seahorses' coastal seagrass habitat (which supports much other wildlife as well), while the commercial shrimp industry nets seahorses as well as other fish. Without intervention the picture is bleak, but Vincent is banking on the photogenic seahorse, as support for it could also save the coastal habitat.

Feminism and Fish

Feminism and curiosity led Vincent to the seagrass fields. "I was interested in the evolution of sex differences, how sexually linked behaviours developed - women growing up in the sixties and seventies in North America tended to think about such things," she says. In human beings and most other animals, the male is traditionally the aggressor, the loudly dressed character who vies for the attention of the female. Would that behaviour persist, Vincent wondered, if the male carried the young - as seahorse males do? In her 1990 Cambridge dissertation, she found that even male seahorses fulfilled the stereotypes, strutting and posturing before potential mates.

Underwater with a seahorse

Intellectual curiosity and a willingness to ignore the beaten track are characteristics that Vincent comes by honestly. She was barely a toddler when her father, at the time a 57-year-old executive at Alcan, but previously a diplomat and a cartographer, gave up the corporate world.

"My parents were sitting on a mountain top in British Columbia, and he decided he wanted to do something different with his life. He was getting frustrated. So they took us to South America for three years of travelling about."

Her father became a freelance writer, her mother a photographer. The example has obviously made an impression on Vincent, a champion risk-taker in her own right, as well as on the rest of her family: brothers Anthony, 57, Nicholas, 53, and Rory, 34.

Another Vincent has trod upon the world stage of late. Last December 17, Anthony Vincent, Canadian ambassador to Peru, was at a reception at the Japanese embassy in Lima was overtaken when Peruvian rebels took almost 500 diners hostage. Anthony was released early to become a key negotiator with the rebels. Amanda missed the drama only because her dinner arrival was delayed by a meeting in London and her plane landed four hours after the hostage-taking. While global intrigue is not a normal part of her life, a global outlook is. Amanda Vincent has travelled and lived on most continents.

"La vraie liberté c'est le vagabondage." The slogan (very roughly translated, "true freedom lies in wandering") adorns a poster now hanging above Vincent's desk. After obtaining her BSc from the University of Western Ontario in 1981, she took the sentiment to heart. "I wasn't sure what I wanted to do," Vincent recalls. "I had a strong feeling that I wanted to change the world. Who knows how to do that? So I set off on my bicycle."

For three years Vincent pedaled through Europe, Australia, China, and other parts of the Orient. "When I ran out of money I worked, and then I travelled again." She bar-tended in Ireland, picked grapes in France, and sheared sheep in Australia. The defining career moment came in Australia at a conference, the International Ethology Congress. Vincent volunteered to work at the conference in exchange for admission, with two outcomes: a research job studying dugongs, large aquatic walrus-like mammals that early sailors are suspected of having mistaken for mermaids, and an introduction to the "extraordinarily impressive" Cambridge behavioural ecologist, Timothy Clutton-Brock.

Clutton-Brock assumed a major role in Vincent's tutelage. She began graduate work at the University of British Columbia, but was dissatisfied and successfully applied to Cambridge. Her would-be supervisor tested her commitment. "He wouldn't take me on until I met him personally, so I had to fly at my own expense to Washington, D.C., to meet him. I think that was part of the test. I think I also captured his attention by having done innovative things and showing that I could take care of myself."

Once accepted, her initial plan was to join a long-term project on Soay sheep, but Clutton-Brock persuaded her to consider hippocampus because, due to their unusual male pregnancy, the seahorse seemed a natural subject for investigating the evolution of sexual behaviours. After making the switch, her former supervisor notes, "Amanda was seduced by seahorses." Yet the challenging problems posed by breeding seahorses in captivity and then writing a doctoral dissertation were not enough to contain Vincent's energy. She also organized ice hockey teams and, recalls Clutton-Brock, "cooked the best brownies in Cambridge." Going to England had drawbacks - the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council cut off Vincent's scholarship, and as a result, she had to scramble for funding: "I had a total of 32 scholarships to get me through that doctorate, as well as student loans." But Cambridge meant access to top scientists and resources, allowing her to act on that youthful desire to change the world, or at least a part of it.

The Tonic Trade

Dried seahorses for Chinese medicine.

Walk into the Magasin des Herbes de l'Asie Quoc Te in Montreal's Chinatown district and you are greeted by sweet smells and friendly staff. Behind the counter, among the large jars of various herbs and roots used in traditional Chinese medicine, there rests a bottle of what appear to be small dried parsnips. On closer inspection, they are bleached seahorses. "A tonic," according to the proprietor, "to make you feel healthy." The price: $3.50 per fish. You can grind it yourself, or have someone at the store grind it for you.

As Vincent points out, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, which draws up the lists of endangered and threatened species, has identified all 35 seahorse species as "vulnerable," and one as officially endangered. A growing demand for traditional Chinese medicine, aquariums and curios is threatening seahorse populations.

The bulk of this trade is for traditional Chinese medicine, which caters to one-quarter of the world's population. Seahorses are used as a general tonic as well as for a variety of ailments and conditions, including asthma, broken bones, skin problems, excessive phlegm, arteriosclerosis and impotence. They have long been thought to carry medicinal powers: the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder suggested mixing the ashes of a seahorse with soda and pig lard to cure baldness, and the use of seahorses in Chinese medicine goes back at least 400 years. Vincent is reluctant to tread casually on this heritage, especially as the seahorse trade is also critical to the survival of many local cultures.

The Joys of Seahorse Sex The seahorse's reproductive process is fascinating for both the scientist and the casual voyeur. First is a three-day courtship period for new couples. Each day, the two partners circle each other, attached by their tails to coral or grass, their tiny fins fluttering. Their bodies brighten in colour. They may move, but they move together. The courtship ritual ensures that both seahorses are physiologically prepared to mate, but it also begins what is a monogamous relationship - one of the very few in nature. (Most animal partners "cheat" on each other all the time. "But in seahorses," says Vincent, "you would be aware of any cheating because the male shows he's mated by being pregnant and the female simultaneously loses her body shape - she contracts quite a bit as she gives her eggs away.") Eventually, the male indicates when he is ready. He compresses his pouch, pumping water in and out, much as he will expel future offspring. After the female's egg depositor, or oviduct, which serves the role of a penis, begins to protrude from her abdomen, they swim towards each other, and the eggs stream into the male's pouch in a long, sticky string. The male fertilizes the eggs once they are in his pouch. After mating, when the male is heavy with young, the female never strays far. (Perhaps she has to be ready to go searching for pickle-and-ice-cream plankton for the expectant dad's midnight cravings.) She greets her mate every morning for a few minutes in a way very similar to their courtship - suggesting a kind of "renewal of vows" that may reinforce the monogamous bond.

Saving the Seahorse

Vincent decided to enlist local communities to protect the beleaguered seahorse population. In the central Philippine village of Handumon, about 40 per cent of the fishers depend on seahorses for 40 per cent of their annual household income and sometimes their entire seasonal income. However, over a 10-year period seahorse catches were reported to have dropped 70 per cent. Clearly a management program was needed.

Three years ago, together with the villagers, Vincent developed a plan which evolved into the world's first seahorse conservation project. In a 33-hectare marine sanctuary, roughly the size of McGill's downtown campus, no fishing of any species is permitted. Only fishing with traditional methods is allowed in a nearby area. Pregnant males captured by fishers are placed in a 50-square-metre mesh cage until they give birth, whereupon the young escape through the mesh to freedom. The males are then sold. Immature seahorses caught by fishers are placed in large fenced "sea corrals" to double in size and value before being sold. The conservation gain here is that the seahorses will start producing young and releasing them into the sea before they are fully grown, replenishing the local population further before they are harvested. The strategy is working: fishers have noted an increase in the numbers of seahorses, as well as other fishes, since the project began. As a result, according to Vincent, the fishers are making more money from larger, healthier catches.

Amanda Vincent is the lone Westerner among a locally based staff of biologists and community workers. She travels from Montreal to visit the project several times a year. It is coordinated with the Haribon Foundation, a Philippine conservation group, and is a model conservation effort, its success encouraging an extension of Vincent's related seahorse project in Vietnam, which was also initiated three years ago. Fish populations are rising in the regions patrolled by the villagers protecting their seahorse corrals. And slowly, tentatively, the seagrass world is changing.

The Seahorse Mystique

The seahorse isn't the only fish in the sea, although it is the poster fish for a package of environmental issues, especially the conservation of coastal seagrass ranges. But thanks to the seahorse, the seas themselves are becoming Vincent's concern and, in some sense, her responsibility. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature recently enlisted Vincent as the "coastal waters" specialist on its committee that identifies species and habitats in danger. According to its chair, David Brackett, "Vincent's community-based projects really recommend her, along with her reputation as a tireless worker - especially since the position is unpaid."

If we were to follow Amanda Vincent as she pulls on her scuba gear and mask to wade into the warm waters along the Philippine coast, we might find the wellspring of her inspiration. It lies in the magical, idyllic world of the seahorse. "I'm besotted by them," she has said. And if, like Amanda Vincent, we offered our hand for the seahorse to hold with its tail and experienced that creature connection, we might understand more fully the desire to conserve that which we have been bequeathed.