Up to last week, in my long(ish) and mostly satisfying life I estimate I had seen around four sea horses. This rather obvious deficiency was spectacularly righted when GF1 insisted we visit the sea horse farm at Beauty Point north of Launceston. Incidentally, and I digress, there was a general complaint among my female travelling companions regarding the fact that most if not all things in this part of the world are named after men. Then I pointed out that Beauty Point is in fact named after a female….cow. Hurt feelings were not assuaged I’m afraid.
Anyway I am now an expert on the reproductive ins and outs (if you’ll excuse the expression) of the seahorse. I know there are 54 species of seahorse of which 23 are in Australia. I’ve seen them in their thousands and they are exported to aquariums all over the world. I’ve even held one and let it twirl its long tail round my finger. But I still don’t know what you call a tank full of sea horses – a herd, a school, a posse, maybe a saddle of sea horses.
And who knew there were things such as hand fish which look like a miniature version of Thing from The Adams Family. They are almost extinct and of one species there are estimated to be only 70 adults left in the world, all of them in the Derwent River. When they sit on the river bed and don’t move much you’d think that would be an open invitation to predators to partake of the hand fish buffet. So it’s not surprising there aren’t many left.
Up to now the trip’s been mostly about animals (Tasmanian Devils, platypuses (platipi?), echidnas (hello Randall you cute little three legged critter), kangaroos, the aforementioned sea horses, wombats and assorted bird and snakes. Oh, and bridges – Richmond Bridge, Batman Bridge and the Hobart bridge that was hit by a barge many years ago, collapsing one of the spans. I had the t-shirt to prove it which in hindsight was a bit morbid and insensitive because there were fatalities. But we joke about everything provided there has been a respectable interval between tragedy and comedy. Why were the Japanese crying poor after the Fukushima tsunami. I saw one house with eight cars and four boats in the driveway. See what I mean.
Time to switch from animal to mineral and The Nut at Stanley.