All Lady Book Review - "Poseidon's Steed: The Story of Seahorses, From Myth to Reality" by Helen Scales, PhD

Is there a more perfect book for All Lady July then a nonfiction written by a female scientist about an animal that DOESN'T give birth to their young? This one ticked all the boxes I didn't even know I needed for ALJ.

I have had more conversations about seahorse mating rituals in the past month then I probably will in my whole life. 

Here are some of my favorite things that I learned in this book:

- Seahorses are notoriously hard to categorize because so many of them can change how they look at will. Like, people will think they discover a new species and then they realize "Nope, he's the same as this guy over there but this guy just made himself green. Not a new species!" So that can be incredibly frustrating to the people who study them!

- There's a region in your brain called your hippocampus (it's important for memory!) that is seahorse shaped. In Greek, hippos means horse and kampos means sea monster. You have a sea monster in your brain, don't be alarmed!

-Seahorses actually make a fair amount of noises and most of them are made by rubbing the back of the skull on a little protrusion on their neck. Scientists literally just figured this out using very high speed cameras.

- Seahorses are used in all kinds of ancient health/healing recipes. Even a natural remedy to perk up a man's lacking libido. Apparently.


-Want to see a male seahorse give birth? I gotchu, fam.








I really liked this book. I learned a lot. It was a fast read. It sparked a lot of interesting conversations.