Ocean Rider, as part of their Seahorse Hawaii Foundation efforts, announced late last year that it was going to be reintroducing seahorses back into the wild in a few locations. On the surface, this sounds like a great step towards conservation. Reintroduction programs are very popular with the public, and who wouldn’t want seahorses reestablished in the wild? Unfortunately, these types of reintroduction programs have limited success, and can actually do more harm than good. It is true that seahorses are at risk from overfishing. But they haven’t disappeared from the wild, making programs to reestablish them moot. Reintroduction programs are generally only beneficial in places that a species has been wiped out completely, and only when the conditions that caused their decline are reversed. Seahorses are still found all over the world, no single species lost from it’s native range. Nor are any critically endangered, for that matter. The sad truth is that the Seahorse Hawaii Foundation’s reintroduction program is ill-advised and unnecessary, and potentially harmful. More: How Ocean Rider Is Fighting to Save Seahorses, and Why That Might Be A Terrible Idea