A male and female sea dragon. Jennifer Tharp/Flickr The third animal that gives birth this way is the sea dragon, which is also related to the seahorse and pipefish.

Eventually, Matsushige and the Birch team got good enough at their job to take aim at the seahorse’s cooler cousin, the sea dragon. That was in 1996 — a long time to set the mood.

The exhibit, which opens Friday, features seahorses, sea dragons, pipefish and ribbonfish. The aquarium has eight leafy and 25 weedy sea dragons, a marine fish in the same family as seahorses.

Sea dragons mirror each other in a courtship dance, spiraling upward before the female deposits her eggs onto a patch on the underside of the male’s tail. Like seahorses, the male carries the ...

Sea dragons mirror each other in a courtship dance, spiraling upward before the female deposits her eggs onto a patch on the underside of the male’s tail. Like seahorses, the male carries the ...

The centerpiece of the exhibition will be one of the largest seadragon habitats in the world featuring an 18-foot-wide by 9-foot-tall exhibit that holds 5,375 gallons of water ...

The question of how long seadragons live has not been fully answered by scientists. Seadragons are hard to observe in the wild and therefore there are no direct measurements of their life span yet. In ...

Since 1995, the Birch Aquarium has bred 13 different seahorse species, sharing more than 5,000 juvenile seahorses with other aquariums around the world. So far, only the weedy sea dragon has been bred ...

Seahorses, like their close relatives the pipefish and sea dragons, sustain themselves by feasting on elusive, spastic little crustaceans called copepods. To do this, ...