These seahorses may all look pretty similar to you, but Gaye Rosier knows each one as an individual by their distinctive facial patterns. They each have a name and, during the 2015 research season Gaye´s volunteer research assistants had the pleasure of choosing the name whenever they discovered a new individual. We now have seahorses named after volunteer divers, their family members, and even their pets!
Gaye has been scuba diving the Costa Brava for the past 16 years, researching and photographing the amazing abundance of marine life, some of which can be viewed on this site. Now that she has retired as marine research coordinator with Kenna Eco Diving, Gaye will be devoting her personal diving time to a breeding colony of European seahorses that she has been researching for the past two years. Already she has catalogued over 50 individual seahorses, both Hippocampus hippocampus and Hippocampus guttulatus, via her Seahorse Project.
"Opportunities to scuba dive and see wild seahorses are very few and far between, and I feel blessed to be able to closely study them." says Gaye, who has spent 4 hours underwater in one day in order to film rare cross-mating between the two different species.
Gaye is a member of the Seahorse Alliance, comprised of European seahorse researchers. She shares her data with The Seahorse Trust and Project Seahorse via their iSeahorse trends monitoring system. In fact, Gaye and her team were the first iSeahorse trends monitoring group to have submitted a full year's worth of data.