The most famous mer are the big ones; the sharks, the whales, the dolphins. Then there are the ones that are smaller, but flashy; big fins and bright patterns. Then come the ones with cool stories, like the coelecanth and salmon, and then the ones that are easy to keep in a tank.

There are a lot of mer out there, though, that barely ever get seen. If the species they copy are good at hiding, they're good at hiding too.

But sometimes, if a naturalist is /very/ very lucky, they'll stumble upon a mer colony, and get to see something special.

Shinsou stumbled on this particular colony completely by chance; the mangroves are protected anyway, and after a bad storm, his uncle and the team went to inspect the damage. Several of the trees were unsalvageable, but they had to clear the water way for the manateemer

That's how he came upon a colony of seahorse mer, living in the rushes under the roots of one of the mangroves

With Uncle's permission, Shinsou rigs up a few cameras to get stills and video of them; if they can prove more endangered mer make their home here, they might get more

funding.

He doesn't expect the seahorse mer and their drama to go viral.

This is the thing about seahorses - and seahorse mer - they spend 75% of their time in one place - tails wrapped firmly around some holdfast or another - which doesn't make for great action, but there are a few mer that kind of ended up in the spotlight of Shinsou's cameras

One - nicknamed Blasty for his tendency to shout at the other mer who get close - spends his time mostly wrapped around one of the mangrove roots, weaving rush nets to catch the tiny crustaceans they all live off of. He shouts at all of the mer, will even throw discarded shells.

Except one, nicknamed Red - his tail is red, and his hair is black, but it looks like he's tried to paint his upper half and his hair red with ochre from the iron-heavy soil.

When Red comes around, Blasty still shouts, but he doesn't throw anything, and he'll trade patched nets

for crustaceans or other food or the small seeds they use to play their own tiny, mostly stationary version of basketball-tennis.

They also groom each other, sometimes, and Shinsou feels vaguely bad about putting it up on mertube

As small as they are, they're sentient creatures, and he's just broadcasting their love life out there, for everyone to see?

But . . . donations to the trust have gone WAY up since people started "shipping' Red and Blasty

Blasty, for all his ire, has a small territory under the mangrove - common for stationary males. Red has a bigger, overlapping territory, but he rarely spends time with any of the other stationary males in the colony.

The mertube comment section goes NUTS when Shinsou posts a

20 minute video that is /definitely/ the first phase of courtship.

It starts out in the early light, just after dawn, and Red brings Blasty a catch of food - river shrimp, it looks like, and he just keeps handing Blasty handful after handful, encouraging him to eat

Red's gone without freshening the red dyes on his body, for once; it's just in his hair. After Blasty eats his fill, they stay sitting beside each other for a while on Blasty's holdfast.

Shinsou wishes he had audio on these cameras . . . maybe he can upgrade with the donations

With no sound, it's impossible to tell when Blasty and Red are saying to each other, or even what dialect of mer they speak, but after a while, facing away from Red, Blasty's whole body brightens; the cream and orange patterns on his body stand out vividly against the dark green

Then he starts to dance.

It's hard to describe a tiny vertical mer dancing, but imagine the twist. Specifically Uma Thurman from Pulp Fiction.

His colors brighten, and he dances, and when he's finished, Red does the same thing - his reds look /redder/ and for each of Blasty's

Uma Thurman moves, he responds like John Travolta, and the pair continues like that for a while, letting their colors brighten, and dancing, and then fading while their partner dances again
After a while - almost an hour of footage, before Aizawa edited it down - they're all done

They seem to come to some kind of agreement, because after the dancing, Red combs his fingers through Blasty's hair and strokes his chest and stomach, and Blasty holds Red and strokes his shoulders.

In real seahorses - not mer - this is called "reciprocal quivering"

Shinsou still labels it "dancing mer"

There's a few days of that repeated, and Shinsou even gets requests for the specific location of this colony so other researchers can do things like test pH and water temperature and stuff, but Shinsou really doesn't want to disturb Blasty and Red, or any of the other pairs

Maybe if the colony gets damaged, or predation becomes a problem - but right now it's healthy, and Shinsou volunteers to take an air-boat out every few days to take some general notes

He waits to take the cameras - they can afford better ones now, but he doesn't want to disturb

any of the courting pairs.

After a few days of the dancing, Red starts something new.

Before he gives Blasty his breakfast, he kind of . . . poses . . . weird

Red gets up into Blasty's space, their tails almost wrapped around each other, and he just kind of /leans/

It's weird, and Shinsou has no idea

why Red's doing it, but after a few minutes, Blasty starts to dance with Red leaning up against him, and Red starts dancing too. But it's slower this time, more like . . . some kind of slow dance, Shinsou doesn't know, Shinsou doesn't /dance/

The next video sends the comments section into CHAOS because after a few repeats of the weird lean and dance move . . . Blasty leaves

Blasty has left his hold fast maybe three times in the last year, but instead of grooming each other after the dancing, Blasty uncurls his tail

and shoots off fast (for a seahorse) into a bed of grass - the grass he usually harvests for his nets that he casts out in front of himself and harvests his own food from - even through Red always brings him more

He's pretty sure there are people in tears because Blasty left

He has /no/ comforting words for them; no one's ever really observed seahorse mer like this before

The next video has the comments section exploding again, mostly with all caps versions of things like 'finally one of my ships sailed!' and 'BLASTY IS BACK' and 'omg nature is so beautiful' because this time, after the leaning and the dancing, and more leaning and dancing,

Red and Blasty just kind of sit . . . a few centimeters apart on the holdfast

Then Blasty scootches up a few inches, and Red follows

It's cute, and it's pretty, watching these colorful mer dance around each other like stripes on a barber pole

They go high enough up that they actually leave the camera's field of view, and Shinsou's pretty grateful, because he's almost positive it's illegal to film coitus no matter how tiny and cute the mer are

But after a while of nothing on the screen, Red and Blasty drift back down

They're holding each other with their arms and their tales, and Red has to kind of dramatically lurch to grab Blasty's favorite spot on his holdfast when they drift past it.

There's a long time of them grooming each other, holding and rubbing, and Red seems to pay extra

attention to Blasty's tum- er, brood pouch - and Blasty seems torn between smacking his hand away and leaning into it

The courting behavior ends after that day, but Red appears - always in the morning, usually five or six times a day - to wrap his tail around Blasty and hug him.

He keeps bringing Blasty food, and they still play the mer tennis-basketball-catch game, and Shinsou thinks they sing together sometimes, and they groom each other and hold each other a lot

Basically, if Red isn't at Blasty's holdfast, he's getting food or materials for them

Red wraps the rough spots of the holdfast with cattail fluff and patrols the area (slowly and adorably - seahorses are not fast at all) and pets Blasty's hair and Blasty eats and bares his teeth if anyone but Red gets close

Blasty gets HUGE as Red's eggs are fertilized and grow in him; his brood pouch is the size of a ping-pong ball, which, on a seahorse mer, is quite sizeable

It takes exactly 47 days (there's more than one twi/tter account monitoring it) for the babies to emerge

The viewers are disappointed that they won't actually see Red and Blasty raise their babies, but as far as they can tell with poor quality video, the babies all seem fine, and they drift into the mangrove colony.

Baby seahorses have to establish themselves.

It looks to be the same for their mer.

Red keeps feeding Blasty for a few weeks until he's recovered his strength. They don't court anymore, but Red's still there, near Blasty's holdfast, all the time, and they still hold each other and groom each other

There's some red tape in the way of contacting mer - first contact is a Big Deal, even with mer - so the audio cameras don't get installed, but Shinsou's hours of video are extremely valuable to researchers

Red and Blasty's fans are delighted when, one year later, Red and Blasty start dancing again.