It’s pitch black in Sweetings Pond in Eleuthera around 10 p.m., and I’m hunting seahorses. I’m in a wet suit and the water is brackish—one careless kick and I’ll float away. Touching the ground is off-limits: You don’t want to stir up billows of sediment or, worse, crush the creatures you’re there to observe. So armed with a flashlight and a GoPro, I hover weightless, aiming my beam and carefully worming my way over the debris below.
For all their ubiquity as beloved nautical creatures, seahorses are famously elusive. Spotting their inches-long bodies in bright shallows is tricky enough. But even when they’re not already blending into their surroundings, they’ll make themselves all but disappear—flipping upside down, burying their faces in vegetation, vanishing in plain sight.
“Most of the time, you’re going to see just a tiny little piece of the seahorse,” explains Heather Mason, a Tampa-based marine ecologist and physiologist who studies seahorse behavior. “You typically look around for tails wrapped around things or sometimes noses. They can change their color to match their background—they are masters of camouflage.”
But at night, everything changes. Within minutes of swimming in this Bahamian pond, I spot one: clinging by her tail to a single branch, snout lifted, belly rounded, bobbing gently in the current. I’m startled and exhilarated.
Then another, and another. Everywhere my beam lands, seahorses sit perched upright like tiny sentinels, inch along stems, and sway in slow motion to music only they can hear. And it’s not just them who come alive. Maybe darkness emboldens would-be prey, but nighttime turns the pond into an underwater disco: octopuses shuffle between hiding places; crabs scuttle, abandoning meals mid-bite; and bioluminescence glows like submerged stars, reducing grown women to awestruck children—me included.
We kill our flashlights and waggle our limbs. The pond erupts, like constellations swirling around us.
“I’m making angels!” shouts Mason, sweeping her arms through the liquid light. Even an esteemed scientist, someone who’s witnessed this phenomenon for years, can still be enchanted by this underwater spell.
The Galapagos-like pond in the Bahamas has unique seahorses, with lines and longer snouts.
Courtesy of the Cove
Creating a national park for seahorses
For the lay-snorkeler, seeing handfuls of seahorses is certainly a wondrous sight. But it takes a seahorse scientist to understand just how significant Sweetings Pond actually is.
Mason had spent years studying these shy, mysterious, somewhat regal fish, usually counting herself lucky to spot one or two in the Bahamian wild. So when her old friend, Ethan Freid, a botanist with the Bahamas National Trust, suggested she check out the population in Sweetings Pond, she wasn’t expecting much.
On her first snorkel in the pond, she saw 16 seahorses. “I was overwhelmed,” she says.
Further research confirmed that Sweetings Pond harbors one of the most concentrated populations of lined seahorses on Earth, a population that can be more than 10 times denser than the global average.
The pond is anchialine: a landlocked body of water fed by underground connections to the sea, but with no surface exchange. Scientists estimate it filled roughly 7,000 years ago, evidenced by fanlike fossilized corals decorating its edges. In places, it plunges 45 feet deep. For generations, it was a secret swimming hole for locals—though not everyone was brave enough to enter. Bahamian folklore is thick with sea-monster stories. (Mason suspects that if anyone saw anything, it was unusually large fish, although no one has studied the pond thoroughly enough to say for certain.)
The pond’s isolation has created something almost Galápagos-like: an enclosed ecosystem where seahorses face few predators and, cut off from their ocean relatives, have begun developing unique characteristics. These seahorses have slightly longer snouts and other subtle shifts that researchers think may be early signs of speciation. It’s evolution in real time.
And then there’s Mason’s accidental discovery of the seahorses’ vibrant night life on a spontaneous after-sunset snorkel with her team, a reminder of how much our diurnal bias shapes science. Simply observing these creatures at night has reshaped what we know about seahorse behavior worldwide.
These discoveries—and years of advocacy—ultimately led to the 2023 designation of Sweetings Pond and its surrounding lands as Seahorse National Park.
The Cove Eleuthera offers an elevated escape near Seahorse National Park.
Photo by Leo Diaz
What to experience at Seahorse National Park right now
Our night dive marked the final session of a test run, offering a glimpse into how future visits to Sweetings Pond might one day allow people to experience it. Since the park’s designation, the Bahamas National Trust has walked a tightrope between conservation and access. How do you share something extraordinary without destroying what makes it extraordinary?
While Seahorse National Park is not yet fully open for visitor experiences at Sweetings Pond, ongoing scientific research and careful planning are shaping how future access may be introduced responsibly. For now, parts of the park are accessible to visitors, including Hatchet Bay Cave. This mile-long cavern features stalagmites and stalactites while hosting a remarkable ecosystem that includes at least four unique species, bats, cockroaches, and unusual plant species adapted to the cave environment. Exploring the cave with a guide is recommended.
I began my seahorse sessions knowing childhood trivia about the bony fish. I left feeling like a field researcher, witnessing rarely seen behavior in a place that still holds secrets. They say there are no frontiers left to explore, but at Sweetings Pond, you’d never believe it.
