Monday 2 November 2020

At Long Last, Another Seahorse from the Past (for Sandra)

Over a month ago, Sandra the Madsnapper had a post entitled Seahorse from the past which included a huge seahorse sculpture in Palmetto, Florida, and also memories of a Seahorse gift shop that used to be in that spot in the past. (See her post for photos.) 

I've never been to Florida, but I commented to Sandra that seahorse combined with gift shop brought up memories for me too and might even inspire me to a blog post of my own some day. Then came October and I forgot about it. Today, however - with rain and storm hitting my windows here, and Sandra posting about something totally different - the seahorse came swimming back through my mind again... Here it is:


While the seahorse sculpture in Florida is huge, mine is tiny (4 cm) and lives (well...) in an old jewellery box. It's a genuine dried sea horse, I think, with a pin attached to it, to be worn as a brooch. If memory serves me right, I bought it in the gift shop at the Maritime Museum in Gothenburg, probably on a school trip when I was like 10-11 years old, in the mid 1960's. I don't seem to have any old photos to date the memory more exactly. 

Googling seahorses now, I find that they have been around for 3 million years, but may now be under threat of extinction - over-fished because of being very popular in Asian medicine. I had no idea. (The weight of mine does not even register on my letter-scale, though, so I don't think I'm sitting on an unexpected fortune... Just a common souvenir from the past.)

10 comments:

  1. What a strangely sad object. An awful lot of animals are going extinct because Asians think they make good medicine.

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    1. Ginny, I agree. It does not look happy, either! I've always kept it in my jewellery box but I can't remember wearing it much (if ever).

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  2. Like Ginny says, it is a strangely sad object. Seahorses are fascinating creatures; I could watch them for hours at the Stuttgart zoo's aquarium. In the 1980s, I had a pair of dangling earrings in the shape of seahorses made of plastic. I wonder what became of them!

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    1. Meike, "strangely sad" sounds appropriate to me as well.
      Are you sure your earrings were plastic? ;)

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  3. yours looks very much like the one i posted, except for the big difference in size.. one reason the seahorses are becoming extinct is they were captured and killed to sell in gift store, so were many other things. way back then, we thought the world would never run out of anything... the shop had tiny seahorse dried like this and hanging on necklaces, pins and ear rings.. that would have been in the 50's ..

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    1. Sandra, I agree. That sculpture you showed photos of looks very much like the real thing apart from the size. And if our Maritime Museum sold real dried ones like this in the 60s, I can well imagine that a lot of other gift shops across the world did, too.

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  4. Live seahorses are the most quaint of creatures. I've seen quite a few and I never cease to be captivated.

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    1. Graham, I actually can't remember if I ever saw any live ones. Possibly at that maritime museum where I bought this brooch, but the only live creature I really remember from there is a big crocodile...

      ... Correction, alligator. Just checked. Another sad story, really. Perhaps worth a separate blog post, but as it's on my mind just now... It came to the aquarium in 1923 and lived there until 1987. In spite of being in captivity it got to be 66 years old. In her lifetime she was best known for 'looking dead' - but when fed or disturbed moving very quickly... They estimate that during her life she was visited by between 5 and 10 million people. And I was one of them. (I remember finding it rather a sad sight even back then, a big animal like that in captivity indoors with very little space to move around. But I suppose that letting it loose wasn't really an alternative!)

      There is actually also a Wikipedia article in English about her:
      Smiley (Alligator) and it says she also got into the Guinness Book of World Records as (at the time) the oldest living alligator in captivity.

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  5. Poor seahorse, hopefully they don't do that now, they are one of my favourite sea creatures. Interesting that you live in Gothenburg, my mum's great grandfather came from there in the 1800s.

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    1. Amy, I don't actually live in Gothenburg; but about an hour's journey inland from there. And in my childhood I lived in/near another city about the same distance from G but further north from where I live now. I've never really spent a lot of time in Gothenburg, only occasional day trips now and then in the past, and in the last 15-20 years I haven't been there at all.

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