This month marks the beginning of our newest contest: "Content Rulez", where fellow UBBers get the chance to show some substance over style. Competition was fierce as many of the entrants were of high quality. In the end Seahorse.org narrowly beat out RobKamphausen.com for first place as our Content Rulez winner. UBBDev caught up with Chris Burns (a.k.a. Raconteur ) for a little horse-talk about his outstanding community and website

Seahorse.org's forum can be found at: http://www.seahorse.org/cgi-bin/UBB/ultimatebb.cgi .

Interview by: tackaberry
Interviewee: <a href="http://www.ubbdev.com/ubbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_profile;u=00009209" >Raconteur</a>

<font color="006699">UBBDev: </font>
Tell me about the history of Seahorse.org and when you got started.

Raconteur:
I have been keeping saltwater fish tanks for about 13 years, and had always been interested in seahorses. About 9 years ago I began working with seahorse in earnest, but found myself in a virtual vacuum of information.

<table align="left"><tr><td><a href="http://www.ubbdev.com/columns/tackaberry/content_rulez/cr_2002_05_1.jpg" alt="seahorse.org home" target="_blank" ></a></td></tr></table>After doing a lot of work on my own, a lot of trial and error, and a lot of independent research, I found a couple of email lists on the net. Sadly, these sorts of environments are not conducive to information sharing and capture, so my partner, Karen Etling, and I got together on a mutual vision of the site.

This vision centered around UBB, as it appeared, at the time, to be the best format for threading conversations and capturing knowledge exchange.

We launched on 1/1/01 and have rapidly become the Internet's largest and most diverse community of hobbyists, researchers, and aquaculturists for seahorses.
<font color="006699">UBBDev: </font>
How many members are on your forum/site?

Raconteur:
We currently have close to 600 active posters on our boards, however there are other areas of the site that require membership. The cumulative total of all membership is around 1400 people.

<font color="006699">UBBDev: </font>
What percentage of them are hobbiests versus researchers?

Raconteur:
The vast majority of our population are hobbyists, however, there are a growing number of university professors, aqua-farms, public aquariums, and independent researchers discovering the site every day. Currently, I would say about 15%-20% of the community are more "professional" than hobbyist.

<font color="006699">UBBDev: </font>
How large is your board "staff", in terms of Admins and Moderators?

Raconteur:
We currently have 12 moderators (we call them Directors), including one MegaModerator and two Administrators (Curators), governing 28 forums (including archives). There is a great need to add a handful of new moderators, however the picking process takes some time. We also have 2 people that help run and administer the IRC rooms.

<font color="006699">UBBDev: </font>
Which are the most popular forums on your board?

Raconteur:
By number of posts, it would be Basic Seahorse Keeping (where new keepers can come to get the info they need), Emergency!! (where the moderators provide immediate feedback and assistance to emergencies - time is critical in healing a sick horse), and General Discussion (plain ol' off-topic chit-chat). However, the fastest growing forums are probably Tankmates (talk about co-habitants) and Dwarf Seahorses (talk about a specific species that only grows to 2").

<font color="006699">UBBDev: </font>
Besides the UBB, what other content do you have on your site?

Raconteur:
We have a pretty large library filled with articles across topics such as: Tank Setup and Maintenance, Tank Mates, Foods and Nutrition, Husbandry, Propagation, Pathology, and a Miscellaneous section where you can get lessons on taxonomy and an interactive guide to seahorse anatomy. We host a seahorse and tankmate identification game within the board. There is a suite of databases, although only one is currently online, designed to track environmental information as well as pathology and treatment info, and propagation statistics. There is a large photo gallery where you can view specific species and the diversity that exists within a given specie, as well as other related fish. We also host two IRC chat rooms on XNet, as well as frequent surveys of the community, and industry news.

<font color="006699">UBBDev: </font>
What are some of the common themed topics on your board?

Raconteur:
Tank mates are always a hot topic. Seahorses cannot be kept with most other fish or invertebrates, so choosing their cohabitants can be a tricky issue.
<table align="left"><tr><td><a href="http://www.ubbdev.com/columns/tackaberry/content_rulez/cr_2002_05_2.jpg" alt="seahorse1" target="_blank" /><img src="http://www.ubbdev.com/columns/tackaberry/content_rulez/cr_2002_05_2.jpg" width="200px" height="150px" align="left" /></a></td></tr></table>Propagation is also hot topic, which is teriffic since the goal of seahorse.org is to encourage captive breeding of seahorses so that the wild populations are not diminished due to our desires.

Another common theme is treatment of diseases. We have learned that seahorses tend to harbor latent pathogens and are extremely susceptible to stress. These two factors combined lead to disease, and we are doing a lot of work to try to ascertain the pathogenic organisms involved and develop new treatments for handling outbreaks.

<font color="006699">UBBDev: </font>
How many "fishtanks" do you have, and what sizes?

Raconteur:
I have 5 tanks currently:

<table align="left"><tr><td><a href="http://www.ubbdev.com/columns/tackaberry/content_rulez/cr_2002_05_3.jpg" alt="pufferfish" target="_blank" ><img src="http://www.ubbdev.com/columns/tackaberry/content_rulez/cr_2002_05_3.jpg" height="150px" width"=200px" alt="pufferfish" /></a></td></tr></table></font></li>
[*]A 125-gallon Indo-Pacific reef tank.
[*]A 40-gallon aggressive species fish-only tank containing 3 relatively rare pufferfish, a triggerfish, a fox-face, and a pair of white-eyed moray eels.
[*]A 25-gallon seahorse tank.
[*]Two 20-gallon breeding/grow-out tanks.
[*]There used to be more, but due to our occupations, time does not currently allow for them.<font color="006699">UBBDev: </font>How many species of seahorses are there?

Raconteur:
This is an issue of much debate. Seahorse taxonomy has been a black hole for a long while, and differentiating species is no easy task. For quite a while now, there have been 32 recognized independent species, however a recent publication by Rudie Kuiter lists over 50 species.

The current trend in thinking is that there are around 40, with the remainder being phenotypic variations on defined species.

<font color="006699">UBBDev: </font>
For those of us who are unfamilar with Seahorses, can you give us a little background.

Raconteur:
Sure! Seahorses are fish... funny, most people do not think of them as a fish.

<table align="left"><tr><td><a href="http://www.ubbdev.com/columns/tackaberry/content_rulez/cr_2002_05_4.jpg" alt="click for larger image" target="_blank" ><img src="http://www.ubbdev.com/columns/tackaberry/content_rulez/cr_2002_05_4.jpg" width="200px" height="150px" /></a>

<a href="http://www.ubbdev.com/columns/tackaberry/content_rulez/cr_2002_05_5.jpg" alt="click for larger image" target="_blank" ><img src="http://www.ubbdev.com/columns/tackaberry/content_rulez/cr_2002_05_5.jpg" width="200px" height="150px" /></a></td></tr></table>The have very bony skeletons which creates a sort of armor-plated appearance. They use their prehensile tail to hold on to things when resting and hunting.

The heads are a mass of bone and cartilege with very few moving parts. This means their mouths are nothing more than tubes with a little flap of skin that can open and close at the end, like lips.

In order to eat, the generate an enormous suction using special gill flaps, called operculae, and an interesting bony structure beneath the chin, called a trigger. The two structures used in conjunction can generate enough power to literally liquefy their food on intake. This is important because they have incredibly small stomachs (nothing more than a very short tube), and do not pull many nutrients out of their food.

This makes them difficult to keep healthy unless they are fed a very specific diet, consisting of small crustaceans such as mysis shrimp, amphipods, and other grass shrimp. They will also eat fish larvae, and larger species have been known to consume small fish.

<font color="006699">UBBDev: </font>
Obviously your site has really taken off, what are your future plans for Seahorse.org?

Raconteur:
Well, we just posted a site survey to get feedback from our community, and based on that we have will be expanding the photo gallery to include more obscure seahorse species and more related fish like pipefish and ghost-pipes. We are always looking to expand the library with more articles and do-it-yourself projects. But the largest goal we have is getting the last two databases online for pathology and propagation tracking. The ultimate goal of seahorse.org is to host, sponsor, and/or create an aquafarm or aquafarm society that completely removes the need for anyone wishing to keep seahorses to take them out of the ocean.

<font color="006699">UBBDev: </font>
Congratulations Chris, your site is really amazing, and you've done a fantastic job of making the UBB&#8482; and integral part of it. Below are a few links to the sample threads submitted for the contest:

• <a href="http://www.seahorse.org/cgi-bin/UBB/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=11&t=000024" target="_blank" >A post from our ID Game forum where members test their knowledge of organism morphometrics and taxonomy</a>
• <a href="http://www.seahorse.org/cgi-bin/UBB/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=7&t=000591" target="_blank" >A little off-topic information exchange regarding pufferfish</a>
• <a href="http://www.seahorse.org/cgi-bin/UBB/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=2&t=000118" target="_blank" >A research thread on seahorse nutrition and its pitfalls (includes some excellent photos of a necropsy!)</a>
• <font size="2" face="verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><font size="2" face="verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><font size="2" face="verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><a href="http://www.seahorse.org/cgi-bin/UBB/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=3&t=000318" target="_blank" >Finally a good bit of broad-topic info exchange concerning Dwarf Seahorses and underwater photography</a>