COMC-301 Lessons

I Want a Medial Temporal Lobe for Christmas

Welcome everyone! I hope your first week back hasn’t thrown too many assignments your way, and that you had an enjoyable break. Hopefully, it was enough time to catch up on any assignments you needed to do!

During the last lesson, you learned about the journals that you will be keeping as a Year Three Care of Magical Creatures student. Today, I am introducing creature observations. These are optional trips to observe the creatures discussed in the lesson. There will be a few multiple choice questions. These assignments are to be completed after the observation. Creature observations will not be every week, but will happen two to four times this year. These will be role-play creature observations. You may elect to do it as a group, owl me and I will discuss the creature with you, or do the assignment to do it.

You may also complete the observation assignment as if you visited it on your own, if you could not attend the field trip. There are several ways to do this assignment, and still receive a good grade.

Hippocampi: The Horses of the Sea

Today we will be learning about the hippocampus, hippocampi plural. The hippocampus is very common in Muggle mythology, being referenced in Greek, Roman, Phoenician, Lydian, and Etruscan lore. The wizarding world, however, recognizes that hippocampi are of Greek descent. The earliest references to hippocampi, in ancient literature and paintings, date back to the second century. Their name is also derived from the ancient Greek language: “hippos” meaning “horse” and “kampos” meaning “sea monster”.

Hippocampi live an average of forty-five years, though the oldest known hippocampus was eighty-three, called Aikaterine by the locals, when she passed. Male hippocampi are called Stalfish, while female hippocampi are called Marfish.

Hippocampi are often called sea horses. The head and forequarters of the animal are that of a horse, while the tail and hindquarters are that of a fish. They are anywhere between four to six feet long, depending on the species. Hippocampi are strictly herbivores, and eat different types of aquatic vegetation, like seaweed and ferns. In times of overpopulation, they will also eat coral, though this is a last resort.

Hippocampi typically live in the Mediterranean area, however, a new species was found off the coast of Scotland in 1949, by merpeople. The hippocampi in that area have since been domesticated and utilized as a form of transportation by the merpeople. Since then, several other species of hippocampi have been discovered, the original discovery opening the floodgates. Below is a chart with the year or era, location, color of each species, and the average species size. It is believed these species have been around as long as the original species, and have evaded human detection until more modern nautical instruments were invented.

Year/Era	Location	Species Color (Front/Rear)	Average Size	Photo
Greek Empire	Greece and surrounding isles	Black/Green	6 feet
1492	Spain	Palomino/Orange	5.5 feet
1949	Scotland	Blue Roan/Blue	4 feet
1955	Florida, United States	Black/Black	5 feet
1961	California, United States	Gray/Silver	5 feet
1972	Japan	White/Silver	5.5 feet

The hippocampus lays large eggs that are semi-transparent. A baby hippocampus is called a Tadfoal. Hippocampi will lay between 5-10 eggs at a time. Hippocampi typically have babies during the month of March, while breeding occurs in late May. This means their gestation period is about ten months long. Once the Tadfoal reaches about half of the adult size, usually between July and September, it will leave its parents and find a mate. Mating will not occur until the male and female are one year old, and once a pair has mated for the first time they become bonded for life.

A newborn Tadfoal (left) and a hippocampus about nine months to a year old (right).

The nest of each pair is unique. Some will make them out of seaweed, whereas others will carve their nest out of coral. A pair will keep, and maintain, the same nest while they are together. If the nest is destroyed, because of war or other circumstances, they will not breed again, even if they have only bred once. Despite the care that both parents show for the nest, only the female directly takes care of the eggs, however. While she will not sit on them, she will hover around them, and check on them frequently, to make sure a fetus hasn’t died.

Hippocampi do live in schools. Most schools are around thirty pairs large in size, however there is a school off the coast of Japan that has 54 recorded pairs.

Hippocampi do not do well in captivity. Usually, it is because they can not be kept in an adequately sized tank. Magizoologists instead have used the Bubble-Head Charm with significant success in studying the hippocampus. Typically, hippocampi allow wizards to study them and are very tolerant. There has never been a case of hippocampi attacking wizards. If a hippocampus is in a bad mood, or the school is going through a rough time, they will alert the wizards. An alert consists of the shaking of hooves wildly in the water until the wizard backs away. Similar actions are seen in mundane horses and other horse-like creatures like unicorns.

Leaders of the hippocampi schools, called Archons, are often the ones speaking to the wizards that are studying them. Under the Bubble Head Charm, wizards can stay underwater for extended periods of time, allowing them to communicate with the Archons for a longer duration and increase our understanding of their society.

While it is difficult to keep a hippocampus in captivity, some wizards have been able to achieve this, with varying success. After the discovery of the blue roan and blue variety in 1949, a group of British magizoologists succeeded in catching a hippocampus. They manipulated a fish tank to appear to be a simple ninety gallon tank filled with feeder fish. However, it was actually a 400 gallon tank, with a coral house, and one blue roan hippocampus. They kept the hippocampus for six months. The hippocampus laid eggs, and they decided to release them into the wild before the eggs hatched. During this study, wizards discovered how many eggs hippocampi lay, and how the mother takes care of them.

While wizards don't utilize the hippocampus, the merpeople living in the areas where different species live have used them as a form of transportation. Some merpeople also keep herds and breed them, selling their extras as transportation to other merpeople in their clan.

There are several relatives to the hippocampus that aren’t acknowledged by the wizarding community, but are acknowledged by the Greeks. These include capricorns, leokampos, and taurokampos. Capricorns are creatures that have the front half of a goat, and the rear half of a fish, while leokampi are creatures with the front half of a lion, and the rear half of a fish. Finally, taurokampi are creatures with the front half of a bull, and the rear half of a fish. While these creatures aren’t recognized by wizarding historians, they are frequently seen in Greek mosaics containing images of hippocampi.

Another relative, recognized by wizards, is the kelpie. While we will go into more detail on kelpies in later years, we can discuss them briefly now. A kelpie is a water being having the appearance of a horse, but can manifest in a human form. They live in the ponds of Scotland and are male in their human forms.

Closing

Hippocampi are one of my favorite creatures, and I do hope you enjoyed learning about them. Today’s homework is an essay, a creative writing piece, and the first creature observation. Be sure to owl me if you have any questions!

Lesson content written by Professor Elizabeth Anne

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