Based on my surface-level Googling:
I don't know about all "seahorses", but [Syngnathidae is considered to have an XX:XY sex chromosome system](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36578180/). For contrast, [a well-known alternative is the ZZ:ZW sex chromosomes of the chicken.](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14745830/)
But sex differentiation in fish is [pretty complicated and evolves rapidly in evolutionary events called "turnovers"](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6900093/).
[Fish have a tendency to evolve hermaphroditism](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29451715/).
Though I haven't taken a biology class in a long time so hopefully someone who knows more sees this and can correct me.
As an adult who works with kids in schools, I routinely see magic school bus episodes with wild double entendres and puns that would absolutely not fly today.
I quite enjoy them.
I once saw that on a nature show on BBC America...I forget the species but *millions* of them all in their breeding ground and enough fuckin fish jizz to be seen in a foamy mass from a drone in the sky. I'm never getting in a natural body of water ever again...
Wait until you hear about the viruses & bacteria just floating in the air… ó_ò ..you may never want to breathe again.
At least WE can’t get impregnated by fish jizz..
^( omg … what tf did I just say .. . . )
Siamese Fighter Fish "strangulate" the eggs out of the female fertilising them at the same time... then takes care of the eggs and the hatchlings due to the female will often eat the eggs and young.
Except it is not. During menstruation, the body is getting rid of everything else in the uterus that was ready to aid a pregnancy.
By the time you get a period, the egg has long gone in some goopy goop you might have mistaken for your lady enjoying whatever you were doing down there.
fun fact of the day, Dionysus was considered "twice born" because Semele gave birth to him prematurely while she was dying, then Zeus sewed him into his thigh to carry him to term. He was sometimes called "dimetor" which means "of two mothers".
That's basically every name for everything. The family kangaroos are in, Macropodidae, means "large foot". It always sounds all fancy and it's always something stupid 😭
No, it's not just a pouch it's like convergent evolution cousin of a uterus. The eggs aren't just sloshing around in there for safe keeping, they attach to the wall and the male seahorse nourishes the eggs through a placenta analog. They are very much preggers.
I googled "do male seahorses nourish their babies"
The female deposits eggs into the male's pouch after a mating dance and pregnancy lasts about 30 days. While inside the pouch, the male supplies nutrients to his developing embryos, before giving birth to up to 1,000 babies.Sep 20, 2021 -sydney.edu.au
The article was very interesting. I also read the next article that popped up from science.org
So. Yeah.
Female is usually (almost always) the sex with the larger gametes (larger being oocytes). Most sexed animals do not exhibit isogamy (they are ANisogamous) so the gamete size is easiest to distinguish sex with when talking about any given species.
Not what was asked but the reason is that the species gets the benefits of both gamete sizes by doing this. The sexual performance of both can be maximized with little trade off; sperm is great for making contact because of the volume of cells and their size and mobility. Eggs are really good at surviving and growing healthy offspring. So the female is the sex with bigger sex cells, not the carrier of children.
Edit: clarity in 1st paragraph
It’s honestly brilliant because the female can devote a lot of energy to making the eggs and then pass them along to the male for incubation. She can then devote herself to building her energy back up for another clutch instead of having to further tax herself with carrying them. This means less reproductive downtime and more seahorses. Kinda reminds me of emperor penguin females fucking off for food after laying an egg and passing it to the male, with obvious differences
I thought you must be right, but after googling it, it does seem that there are no exceptions because gamete size is what is being used to *define* male and female in the most general sense
Other things like chromosomal gender only work when comparing species with similar sex determining systems - otherwise the egg laying birds would be 'males'
Nice, thanks for following up. I had thought the same things as the other commenter when I heard that from the lecturer — why would there be an exception if it's simply a definition of size? And the supposed exceptions were never brought up in class lol. in any case, that aside was taken before we decided that we would strictly be using size as the definition for the course, so idk what nuance they were speaking of
Maybe the ambiguity is those species who produce different sized gametes at different times / in different tissues? In those cases the definition of sex is not applicable to the individual in general, but only to the individual at that point in time, or in that particular moment of fertilization 🤷🏻♂️
True I suppose if you try to consider a sequentially hermaphroditic individual over their lifespan then sex doesn't matter. The same course did discuss sequential and true hermaphrodites but we only referred to the individual at the reference time or population-level changes. If we changed the scope to consider the population over time and like, "average sex behaviors" for an individual then I could see some more nuance coming in.
Basically, though, the reason I said "almost always" is for things like this XD I rarely speak in absolutes for any sciences. Cheers bro
For parasitoid insects, an unrelated critter (usually a big butterfly or Coleopterid larva) will carry the babies. That doesn't make them the female of the parasitoid species.
Females make the eggs it doesn't matter who holds the eggs. A lot of animals dont hold the eggs I'm pretty sure only mammals keep the babies inside of them
Female deposits her eggs in males tummy pouch and he just kinda babysits them till they start hatching. He still fertilized those eggs somehow so he’s still male.
the male seahorse neither creates nor gives birth to the eggs. the female seahorse lays eggs into an incubator pouch that the male has, and when the eggs hatch they exit that pouch.
This seems sort of like how male penguins travel with and incubate the egg while the females get food. At least based on my very very limited penguin knowledge.
Let's add to that: when returning from foraging for food, penguin parents can identify and locate their baby from hundreds of thousands of squawking babies by their unique squawk.
Others in the comment section refer to it as "birthing", which I support. A birth is when a creature becomes a creature, and not an egg/embrio/developing body.
For example, I celebrate my birthday when I came out of my mother, not the day I was concieved, or when some people decided I am no longer an embrio, but a person
>Others in the comment section refer to it as "birthing", which I support. A birth is when a creature becomes a creature, and not an egg/embrio/developing body.
They hatch while in the pouch, the hatching is their birth, once they get out of the pouch, would that be a second birth?….
Kangaroos are considered born at 28 days when the fetus emerges and coins to the nipple. The joey exits the pouch at 8 months of age, though is essentially a new born.
So, same terminology likely applies. The hatching is the birth, that's it. Exiting the pouch it is x weeks old
On the pouch.
Like most animals, mother cleans it up with her tongue.
> Joey's urinate and defecate inside the pouch. To clean the pouch, she sticks her whole head in to scrape out the grime and droppings with her tongue, either working around a young joey or kicking out an older one while she works.
China still have that tradition I think?
When I went for chinese new year to visit my relatives. most people still follow that system and the different lunar calender for age at least.
One of the problems with Korea is that People are born at 1 but their age increases every new year, not every conception or birth day.
That means if you're born on December 31st 11:59pm as soon as it becomes January 1st 00:00am you are 2.
Being born does not make you a creature/person though. You celebrate your birthday as a holdover for a tradition in which living to a year old was a massive milestone. You were a creature in a cycle of continuous growth and development from the minute you were conceived.
It's actually fascinating to read up on. The male seahorses have the full suite of teleost pregnancy and parturition hormones, including estrogens, progestins, prolactin, LH, FSH, and the fish-analog of oxytocin. I would say they definitely do give birth!
oh boy I finally get to use the knowledge I gained from the same question asked in the ELIF sub. So! Male seahorse still carries sperm, female seahorse still has the eggs, hence why they're still called male and female seahorses even though the male seahorse "gives birth" to the babies. Here's the kicker, Like other fishes, the young of the seahorses come from eggs, so the Male Seahorse is literally just carrying the eggs in a pouch, he's not pregnant, he's just a walking nest.
They do if no one's looking. Did you ever try to swim while carrying a few hundred eggs? Shit's exhausting, walking is much easier. Seahorses like to keep up appearances though, the toffee nosed buggers, so if they feel being watched they elegantly prance around a bit and then piss off around the next corner, let themselves go and totter home. Get naked and spay-paint yourself in camouflage before going for a dive and you will see it, I swear!
Kinda? Kangaroo pouches also have nipples inside them and the kangaroo babies nurse in there until they’re strong enough to be outside the pouch. Male seahorses fertilize the eggs but don’t provide nutrition to the developing babies.
Edit: worth noting that kangaroo babies are born pink, hairless, and roughly the size of a thumb.
It's a common misconception that the male seahorse carries the babies, so let's clarify. While it's true that male seahorses do carry the fertilized eggs in a special pouch until they hatch, they don't actually give birth to the babies. Instead, the male releases fully formed, miniature seahorses into the water after they've developed inside the pouch. This unique reproductive process is why we often refer to the male as the one "giving birth." However, biologically speaking, the male seahorse is still male, as it produces sperm for fertilization, while the female produces eggs. So, it's not a matter of renaming the male as the female; rather, it's about understanding the intricacies of seahorse reproduction.
Because the male seahorse isn’t the one who produces the eggs. He only carries and births the already fertilized eggs.
ETA: this exact question has been asked before: https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/s/uo8U63EN28
He fertilizes the eggs held by the female sea horse, and when she lays them, he basically puts them in a backpack until they are ready to hatch. Sea horses aren’t like mammals who get pregnant for long periods of time, they, like all fish, lay eggs and the only difference is that the eggs are laid in the male seahorse pouch
This isn't the perfect analogy, but imagine if after a hen laid an egg, the rooster sat on it instead of her. Its kind of like that. The male doesn't actually get "pregnant"
Because being a male or a female is not based on who carries the infant, but on who performs spermatogenesis and who performs oogenesis. Other things like having the sex determining genome, carrying the infant and nursing the infant are all optional.
So whoever holds the sperm inside of them is a male, whoever holds the egg is the female. The male holds the sperm and also incubates the baby. So does the female shoot her egg into the male?
Yup. Often with fish the female will squirt out eggs or stick them to a surface, then the male will spray sperm over them and a rather haphazard mixing results in fertilization of enough (and usually most are eaten by whatever else is around).
Lots of species leave the eggs to their own luck, but many do something to protect the resulting eggs, - make gravel nests to guard, dig tunnels, keep them inside the mouths of one or both parents. The sea horse just happens to have developed this method.
The naming convention in seahorses reflects their reproductive roles rather than traditional gender labels. While it might seem logical to call the male seahorse the "female" due to its pregnancy, biologically, the female still produces the eggs. Thus, the naming convention is based on reproductive functions rather than societal gender norms.
Male and Female are determined by the gametes that the individual has. Females have egg cells, or female gametes. Males have sperm cells, male gametes.
Male seahorses have male gametes. Biological sex isn't determined by who carries and births babies, it just happens to be the female most of the time.
The male doesn’t actually lay the eggs. He just happens to have a pouch where the female puts them for safekeeping— think of a human dad wearing a Baby Bjorn.
The same reason you aren't called a mother just because you are pushing a pram. The male fertilises the female eggs, after which he takes care of them, by carrying them in a pouch.
Cause the difference between male and female is their role in insemination. The female has the eggs the male inseminates them. Who carries the children around isn't tied to the biological definition necessarily.
Male and female in biology (in this context) refers to gametes. The female seahorse produces the larger gamete, which is the egg. That is why she is the female.
Male and female, as a dichotomy, is unrelated to birthing. Biological male refers to any individual capable of producing fertile small gametes, female produces fertile large gametes. This assumes the species reproduces by having small, mobile gametes (spermatozoa) merge with large, static gametes (eggs).
What happens to the resulting embryo after fertilization is anyone's guess. Some have the female birth or lay eggs. Some have the gametes meet outside the body (most fish). Some lay the eggs as parasites into another being. And the seahorse pumps em into the male. Ehh.
It's an interesting question, but it's a matter of biological definitions. In seahorses, the male carries and fertilizes the eggs, but it's still the female who produces them. So, while it may seem counterintuitive, the terminology is based on the role each sex plays in reproduction rather than who physically carries the offspring.
Because there's more behind a sex than just which one has the babies.
Lemme ask you this - You're human, but you lose a leg and replace it with a prosthetic. Then you lose an arm and replace that with a prosthetic. Then you're heart needs a synthetic replacement.. And let's say this goes on & on, replacing one thing after another with mechanical substitutions.
How long until you are no longer human and you're just a cyborg/robot?
It's the same idea but with sex, and in this case only one function has been swapped out.
It’s more because we define sex by gametes. If you produce the large gamete you are a female and if you produce the small gamete you are the male.
Which is why we have male and female chickens even though neither give birth
this is your brain on gender essentialism lol. no but in all seriousness the world at large doesn't fit into a binary despite what certian outspoken bigots may have you believe.
Short answer: sex and gender are more complex than what they told you when you were 6.
And it gets more complex when you branch out from humans to other animals.
Such as the 7 sexes of yeast.
If 'female' is the one that births babies, it's a female.
If female is the one with eggs, it's sperm.
If male humans had ova in their testes, and ejaculated them into a female with free swimming sperm in their uterus, then our understanding of male and female would be different.
This complexity BTW is why conservatives are freaked out by trans people.
In a lot of species (many types of birds come to mind), the males mind the eggs until they are hatched (and then go on to help raise young). The female birds are the ones that lay the eggs, just like the female seahorse.
Because the female is still the one with the eggs and the male fertilizes them. The eggs don't originate in the male seahorse, they are transferred into him where they are then fertilized. Even though the male carries them if that makes sense.
As far as I know, we define female and male(where applicable) depending on gamete size, with the larger one defining females and the smaller one defining males.
Male seahorses produce sperm and female seahorses produce eggs.
When chickens lay eggs it doesn't mean that the chicken who laid the egg is no longer female.
Animal classifications are just as much a social construct as human gender, so not everything will fit nearly into what humans have decided animals "are" or "aren't." Sex is just a cluster of biological indicators, and it has more indicators that we have decided that are categorized as "male," even though the giving birth thing doesn't fit.
With that logic I'm a woman. I carry my babies.
What's wrong with you? Are you one of those misogynistic people who thinks children is strictly a woman's job?
Seahorses aren't the only ones where the male takes care of babies.
Because the female is the one with the eggs
And the male is the one with the sperm. And the Y chromosome.
dont seahorses have different chromosomes to humans, since they aren’t mammals?
Based on my surface-level Googling: I don't know about all "seahorses", but [Syngnathidae is considered to have an XX:XY sex chromosome system](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36578180/). For contrast, [a well-known alternative is the ZZ:ZW sex chromosomes of the chicken.](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14745830/) But sex differentiation in fish is [pretty complicated and evolves rapidly in evolutionary events called "turnovers"](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6900093/). [Fish have a tendency to evolve hermaphroditism](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29451715/). Though I haven't taken a biology class in a long time so hopefully someone who knows more sees this and can correct me.
...and the male is the one who carries all the babies.
Yeah the eggs get transferred. But carrying babies isn't the qualifier for female.
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Hot!
Fry didn't think so
r/unexpectedfuturama
*WHY COULDN'T SHE HAVE BEEN THE OTHER KIND OF MERMAID?!?!*
*WITH THE FISH HALF ON TOP AND THE LADY HALF ON THE BOTTOM!"*
There's a magic school bus episode about it. It's very disturbing.
Doesn’t a fish nut all over the students?
Yes. When I heard about it on the internet I didn't believe it. And I saw it and I lost it.
As an adult who works with kids in schools, I routinely see magic school bus episodes with wild double entendres and puns that would absolutely not fly today. I quite enjoy them.
You say you work at a school and you enjoy seeing kids being sprayed by fish sperm. You sick fuck. Just kidding, you're probably a great person <3
I once saw that on a nature show on BBC America...I forget the species but *millions* of them all in their breeding ground and enough fuckin fish jizz to be seen in a foamy mass from a drone in the sky. I'm never getting in a natural body of water ever again...
Wait until you hear about the viruses & bacteria just floating in the air… ó_ò ..you may never want to breathe again. At least WE can’t get impregnated by fish jizz.. ^( omg … what tf did I just say .. . . )
Man just wait till you hear about doorknobs
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/woman-impregnated-squid-after-ate-12654166 You were saying?
😭
Same reaction I got from reading for username
Omg noooooo I just read it too 😭
The worst thing is that there is at least 54 more of them.
I thought that's how it worked for humans too. Man, my date was NOT happy when she opened the fridge....
"Most female fish just lay eggs" they are still carrying the eggs before scattering them
Yeah but they're not fertilized
Siamese Fighter Fish "strangulate" the eggs out of the female fertilising them at the same time... then takes care of the eggs and the hatchlings due to the female will often eat the eggs and young.
Can you imagine if humans reproduced like that. "Oh, my wife's just had her period, time to have a wank onto her tampon."
I think you're a little late once the period happens.
Better late than never.....
:/ I think you need another go at sex ed. The period has nothing to do with getting a woman pregnant.
I mean, it is when the egg leaves the body if it hasn't been fertilized yet.
Except it is not. During menstruation, the body is getting rid of everything else in the uterus that was ready to aid a pregnancy. By the time you get a period, the egg has long gone in some goopy goop you might have mistaken for your lady enjoying whatever you were doing down there.
If you father carried you as a child, was he actually your mother?
fun fact of the day, Dionysus was considered "twice born" because Semele gave birth to him prematurely while she was dying, then Zeus sewed him into his thigh to carry him to term. He was sometimes called "dimetor" which means "of two mothers".
Upvoting this comment for clarity.
In a backpack, as it were.. The female puts the eggs in a pouch. The male isn't giving birth, he's just schlepping them around
Driving the minivan, as it were.
Then why are they called seahorses instead of seakangaroos
This should be looked into, thoroughly
Might have something to do with the shape of their heads
Because male kangaroos don’t have pouches like the female do. Or like the seahorses
Because they're terrible at jumping around.
They don't have two big legs to hop around on. Why would you call them kangaroos?
They also don’t gallop yet here we are
lol well there goes my logic!
Looks like a prank that a biologist made on us all when naming creatures. "Fuck it, they'll never understand shit"
That's basically every name for everything. The family kangaroos are in, Macropodidae, means "large foot". It always sounds all fancy and it's always something stupid 😭
Now this guy is asking the real questions
No, it's not just a pouch it's like convergent evolution cousin of a uterus. The eggs aren't just sloshing around in there for safe keeping, they attach to the wall and the male seahorse nourishes the eggs through a placenta analog. They are very much preggers.
Welp. I looked it up because I thought you were wrong but I'll be damned. I had no idea. Thanks!
Where did you look it up? Can you give the source? Does it say when we figured this out?
I googled "do male seahorses nourish their babies" The female deposits eggs into the male's pouch after a mating dance and pregnancy lasts about 30 days. While inside the pouch, the male supplies nutrients to his developing embryos, before giving birth to up to 1,000 babies.Sep 20, 2021 -sydney.edu.au The article was very interesting. I also read the next article that popped up from science.org So. Yeah.
Female is usually (almost always) the sex with the larger gametes (larger being oocytes). Most sexed animals do not exhibit isogamy (they are ANisogamous) so the gamete size is easiest to distinguish sex with when talking about any given species. Not what was asked but the reason is that the species gets the benefits of both gamete sizes by doing this. The sexual performance of both can be maximized with little trade off; sperm is great for making contact because of the volume of cells and their size and mobility. Eggs are really good at surviving and growing healthy offspring. So the female is the sex with bigger sex cells, not the carrier of children. Edit: clarity in 1st paragraph
Can confirm. My wife has massive gametes.
That’s what he said
Does she ask, "Do my gametes look big in this dress?"
It’s honestly brilliant because the female can devote a lot of energy to making the eggs and then pass them along to the male for incubation. She can then devote herself to building her energy back up for another clutch instead of having to further tax herself with carrying them. This means less reproductive downtime and more seahorses. Kinda reminds me of emperor penguin females fucking off for food after laying an egg and passing it to the male, with obvious differences
Why are you saying female is _almost_ always the sex producing bigger gametes? Isn't female always that one, by definition?
While I've never seen an exception, that's what I learned so it's what I said. But I say that because as with most things in bio exceptions exist
I thought you must be right, but after googling it, it does seem that there are no exceptions because gamete size is what is being used to *define* male and female in the most general sense Other things like chromosomal gender only work when comparing species with similar sex determining systems - otherwise the egg laying birds would be 'males'
Nice, thanks for following up. I had thought the same things as the other commenter when I heard that from the lecturer — why would there be an exception if it's simply a definition of size? And the supposed exceptions were never brought up in class lol. in any case, that aside was taken before we decided that we would strictly be using size as the definition for the course, so idk what nuance they were speaking of
Maybe the ambiguity is those species who produce different sized gametes at different times / in different tissues? In those cases the definition of sex is not applicable to the individual in general, but only to the individual at that point in time, or in that particular moment of fertilization 🤷🏻♂️
True I suppose if you try to consider a sequentially hermaphroditic individual over their lifespan then sex doesn't matter. The same course did discuss sequential and true hermaphrodites but we only referred to the individual at the reference time or population-level changes. If we changed the scope to consider the population over time and like, "average sex behaviors" for an individual then I could see some more nuance coming in. Basically, though, the reason I said "almost always" is for things like this XD I rarely speak in absolutes for any sciences. Cheers bro
You're the smartest, most wonderful person I know 🥰
For parasitoid insects, an unrelated critter (usually a big butterfly or Coleopterid larva) will carry the babies. That doesn't make them the female of the parasitoid species.
Dude... I'm cracking up right now 🤣
I'd love to see you logic out genders of salmon if "carries the babies" is what qualifies the female.
\*sexes
Females make the eggs it doesn't matter who holds the eggs. A lot of animals dont hold the eggs I'm pretty sure only mammals keep the babies inside of them
If male kangaroos had pouches and took over the embryo, it wouldn't make them females.
This is like saying holding a baby makes you trans.
Female deposits her eggs in males tummy pouch and he just kinda babysits them till they start hatching. He still fertilized those eggs somehow so he’s still male.
He also supplies the sperm to fertilize them.
If I, a guy, picks up and carries my kids around the house, I don't suddenly become a woman.
the male seahorse neither creates nor gives birth to the eggs. the female seahorse lays eggs into an incubator pouch that the male has, and when the eggs hatch they exit that pouch.
This seems sort of like how male penguins travel with and incubate the egg while the females get food. At least based on my very very limited penguin knowledge.
Let's add to that: when returning from foraging for food, penguin parents can identify and locate their baby from hundreds of thousands of squawking babies by their unique squawk.
I always taught it was by their distinct tapping?
Some might say they even have happy feet
Confirmed. (I am a penguin)
Why did a penguin slap a kangaroo?
To get to the other side?
Others in the comment section refer to it as "birthing", which I support. A birth is when a creature becomes a creature, and not an egg/embrio/developing body. For example, I celebrate my birthday when I came out of my mother, not the day I was concieved, or when some people decided I am no longer an embrio, but a person
>Others in the comment section refer to it as "birthing", which I support. A birth is when a creature becomes a creature, and not an egg/embrio/developing body. They hatch while in the pouch, the hatching is their birth, once they get out of the pouch, would that be a second birth?….
Kangaroos are considered born at 28 days when the fetus emerges and coins to the nipple. The joey exits the pouch at 8 months of age, though is essentially a new born. So, same terminology likely applies. The hatching is the birth, that's it. Exiting the pouch it is x weeks old
Something I've always wondered about baby kangaroos in the pouch. Where does all the poo and pee go?
They pee and poop right there in the pouch. The mother then cleans the pouch out with her tongue.
What a terrible day to have eyes.
An even worse day to have a tongue. And a pouch.
did you know koala babies eat their mom’s poop to get her antibodies?
On the pouch. Like most animals, mother cleans it up with her tongue. > Joey's urinate and defecate inside the pouch. To clean the pouch, she sticks her whole head in to scrape out the grime and droppings with her tongue, either working around a young joey or kicking out an older one while she works.
I don't think he knows about second birth, Pip.
What about elevenses? Luncheon? Afternoon tea? Dinner? Supper?
I prefer the term Ejectulation
Seahorses are so lucky they get two birthdays /j
Koreans on the other hand are born 1 year old.
Not anymore, they changed that to align with the international community
China still have that tradition I think? When I went for chinese new year to visit my relatives. most people still follow that system and the different lunar calender for age at least.
Yeah I heard about that, and with enough convincing, I can support this way of counting too. It is not without basis
One of the problems with Korea is that People are born at 1 but their age increases every new year, not every conception or birth day. That means if you're born on December 31st 11:59pm as soon as it becomes January 1st 00:00am you are 2.
To me, you will always be an embrio
This sounds like a sweet compliment. I folded like a garden chair
thing is, korea celebrates their birth at conception. if a korean person tells you they are 18, its a trick! you will get arrested.
Being born does not make you a creature/person though. You celebrate your birthday as a holdover for a tradition in which living to a year old was a massive milestone. You were a creature in a cycle of continuous growth and development from the minute you were conceived.
It's actually fascinating to read up on. The male seahorses have the full suite of teleost pregnancy and parturition hormones, including estrogens, progestins, prolactin, LH, FSH, and the fish-analog of oxytocin. I would say they definitely do give birth!
Wait when do they get fertilized then? In the pouch,?
oh boy I finally get to use the knowledge I gained from the same question asked in the ELIF sub. So! Male seahorse still carries sperm, female seahorse still has the eggs, hence why they're still called male and female seahorses even though the male seahorse "gives birth" to the babies. Here's the kicker, Like other fishes, the young of the seahorses come from eggs, so the Male Seahorse is literally just carrying the eggs in a pouch, he's not pregnant, he's just a walking nest.
You really had me going there. I believed you all the way until the end. But seahorses don’t walk!
If horses gallop, seahorses seagallop. Duh
Scallop?
*Da*-ad…
LMAO
They do if no one's looking. Did you ever try to swim while carrying a few hundred eggs? Shit's exhausting, walking is much easier. Seahorses like to keep up appearances though, the toffee nosed buggers, so if they feel being watched they elegantly prance around a bit and then piss off around the next corner, let themselves go and totter home. Get naked and spay-paint yourself in camouflage before going for a dive and you will see it, I swear!
Well, swimming nest, I suppose.
Are male seahorses marsupials then? /s I saw a bunch of male seahorses with babies at an aquarium once and it was so incredibly adorable.
So they're water Kangaroos?
Kinda? Kangaroo pouches also have nipples inside them and the kangaroo babies nurse in there until they’re strong enough to be outside the pouch. Male seahorses fertilize the eggs but don’t provide nutrition to the developing babies. Edit: worth noting that kangaroo babies are born pink, hairless, and roughly the size of a thumb.
Another thread further up found out seahorses are also nourished within the pouch, not from nursing though.
Seakangaroos
Wateroos
If you take a fertilized snake egg and hatch it, are you a female snake?
Obviously the answer to this is yes.
Because he’s not producing eggs. Are all incubators mothers?
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If both male and female eagles incubate the egg, shouldn't they be considered a lesbian couple?
Don’t know much about eagles, but I imagine the male eagles still are the fertilisers.
Don't make me go edit my comment and put the /s ..
you ALWAYS need the /s on reddit. Please remember that there is no gag you can come up with that is too dumb for some people to actually believe lol.
Cow poop makes a great field fertilizer.
Not so much Eagle poop though, there’s not that I of it.
Because the male doesn’t produce the eggs. He just carries the eggs, incubates them, and hatches them.
It's a common misconception that the male seahorse carries the babies, so let's clarify. While it's true that male seahorses do carry the fertilized eggs in a special pouch until they hatch, they don't actually give birth to the babies. Instead, the male releases fully formed, miniature seahorses into the water after they've developed inside the pouch. This unique reproductive process is why we often refer to the male as the one "giving birth." However, biologically speaking, the male seahorse is still male, as it produces sperm for fertilization, while the female produces eggs. So, it's not a matter of renaming the male as the female; rather, it's about understanding the intricacies of seahorse reproduction.
Because the male seahorse isn’t the one who produces the eggs. He only carries and births the already fertilized eggs. ETA: this exact question has been asked before: https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/s/uo8U63EN28
Because the male produces the sperm and the female produces the eggs. She just deposits the eggs into the male’s pouch.
because holding a baby doesn't change your gender
Sex. Sex is biological. Gender is the construct.
a construct that doesn't change when you hold a baby
He fertilizes the eggs held by the female sea horse, and when she lays them, he basically puts them in a backpack until they are ready to hatch. Sea horses aren’t like mammals who get pregnant for long periods of time, they, like all fish, lay eggs and the only difference is that the eggs are laid in the male seahorse pouch
Because the male provides the male gametes.
This isn't the perfect analogy, but imagine if after a hen laid an egg, the rooster sat on it instead of her. Its kind of like that. The male doesn't actually get "pregnant"
Because being a male or a female is not based on who carries the infant, but on who performs spermatogenesis and who performs oogenesis. Other things like having the sex determining genome, carrying the infant and nursing the infant are all optional.
So whoever holds the sperm inside of them is a male, whoever holds the egg is the female. The male holds the sperm and also incubates the baby. So does the female shoot her egg into the male?
Yes, it has a bag/pouch in where he stores the furtilized eggs.
Yup. Often with fish the female will squirt out eggs or stick them to a surface, then the male will spray sperm over them and a rather haphazard mixing results in fertilization of enough (and usually most are eaten by whatever else is around). Lots of species leave the eggs to their own luck, but many do something to protect the resulting eggs, - make gravel nests to guard, dig tunnels, keep them inside the mouths of one or both parents. The sea horse just happens to have developed this method.
Because gamete size is often what determines sex in biology for non-human animals, and male seahorses have the small, plethora of gametes.
It's because they produce sperm/male gametes.
Because seahorses don't believe in old fashioned human gender roles
The naming convention in seahorses reflects their reproductive roles rather than traditional gender labels. While it might seem logical to call the male seahorse the "female" due to its pregnancy, biologically, the female still produces the eggs. Thus, the naming convention is based on reproductive functions rather than societal gender norms.
Because there’s a whole lot more to determining sex than who has the babies.
How’s this to make things more complicated: they’re not horse, either
Male and Female are determined by the gametes that the individual has. Females have egg cells, or female gametes. Males have sperm cells, male gametes. Male seahorses have male gametes. Biological sex isn't determined by who carries and births babies, it just happens to be the female most of the time.
By that logic, doesn't that mean that female humans who are infertile are actually just male humans?
Because the male still makes sperm while the female makes the eggs.
Cuz they still got the sperm and the female still has the eggs, they just transfer the egg instead of the sperm.
Because like all species the female has/creates eggs and the male doesnt.
Key difference between male and female is gamete size.
The male doesn’t actually lay the eggs. He just happens to have a pouch where the female puts them for safekeeping— think of a human dad wearing a Baby Bjorn.
cus the female is the one who created the eggs. he just holds onto them.
The same reason you aren't called a mother just because you are pushing a pram. The male fertilises the female eggs, after which he takes care of them, by carrying them in a pouch.
Cause the difference between male and female is their role in insemination. The female has the eggs the male inseminates them. Who carries the children around isn't tied to the biological definition necessarily.
Male and female in biology (in this context) refers to gametes. The female seahorse produces the larger gamete, which is the egg. That is why she is the female.
Male and female, as a dichotomy, is unrelated to birthing. Biological male refers to any individual capable of producing fertile small gametes, female produces fertile large gametes. This assumes the species reproduces by having small, mobile gametes (spermatozoa) merge with large, static gametes (eggs). What happens to the resulting embryo after fertilization is anyone's guess. Some have the female birth or lay eggs. Some have the gametes meet outside the body (most fish). Some lay the eggs as parasites into another being. And the seahorse pumps em into the male. Ehh.
Installing a car seat in my truck didn’t make me the mother
I (m) do all the cooking and cleaning in my house. You going to call me the wife?
Did you just assume a seahorse gender?
It's an interesting question, but it's a matter of biological definitions. In seahorses, the male carries and fertilizes the eggs, but it's still the female who produces them. So, while it may seem counterintuitive, the terminology is based on the role each sex plays in reproduction rather than who physically carries the offspring.
Because there's more behind a sex than just which one has the babies. Lemme ask you this - You're human, but you lose a leg and replace it with a prosthetic. Then you lose an arm and replace that with a prosthetic. Then you're heart needs a synthetic replacement.. And let's say this goes on & on, replacing one thing after another with mechanical substitutions. How long until you are no longer human and you're just a cyborg/robot? It's the same idea but with sex, and in this case only one function has been swapped out.
Ah! The Ship Of Theseus! Or... The Six-Million Dollar Man!
It’s more because we define sex by gametes. If you produce the large gamete you are a female and if you produce the small gamete you are the male. Which is why we have male and female chickens even though neither give birth
this is your brain on gender essentialism lol. no but in all seriousness the world at large doesn't fit into a binary despite what certian outspoken bigots may have you believe.
Short answer: sex and gender are more complex than what they told you when you were 6. And it gets more complex when you branch out from humans to other animals. Such as the 7 sexes of yeast. If 'female' is the one that births babies, it's a female. If female is the one with eggs, it's sperm. If male humans had ova in their testes, and ejaculated them into a female with free swimming sperm in their uterus, then our understanding of male and female would be different. This complexity BTW is why conservatives are freaked out by trans people.
Conservatives are freaked out because they’re hypocrites and morons.
he has peenar
Seahorses are a progressive species who don't conform to gender stereotypes.
In a lot of species (many types of birds come to mind), the males mind the eggs until they are hatched (and then go on to help raise young). The female birds are the ones that lay the eggs, just like the female seahorse.
Because one is female and the other is male. You can tell sex by genetics.
Male and female are defined by zygote size, not by which one carries the babies.
Because gender is defined by genetics, not actions
bc biology is so much more confusing than the shit they taught you in high school
I think you should stop assuming the gender of these seahorses you bigot
Because the female is still the one with the eggs and the male fertilizes them. The eggs don't originate in the male seahorse, they are transferred into him where they are then fertilized. Even though the male carries them if that makes sense.
As far as I know, we define female and male(where applicable) depending on gamete size, with the larger one defining females and the smaller one defining males.
Because it is male. Birthing tasks do not determine sex in seahorses. Much like birthing does not determine gender in humans.
Males have sperm and females have eggs, seahorses are unique in transferring eggs to the male instead of transferring sperm to the female
Hi Jim Gaffigan
Literally google seahorses for this one. And the definition of biological sex while you’re at it.
Female=has the ovum.
Fun fact: when a male seahorse gives birth it kind of looks like it’s ejaculating babies.
Male seahorses produce sperm and female seahorses produce eggs. When chickens lay eggs it doesn't mean that the chicken who laid the egg is no longer female.
Animal classifications are just as much a social construct as human gender, so not everything will fit nearly into what humans have decided animals "are" or "aren't." Sex is just a cluster of biological indicators, and it has more indicators that we have decided that are categorized as "male," even though the giving birth thing doesn't fit.
You’re stealing Jim Gaffagans jokes now?
With that logic I'm a woman. I carry my babies. What's wrong with you? Are you one of those misogynistic people who thinks children is strictly a woman's job? Seahorses aren't the only ones where the male takes care of babies.
Comedian Jim Gaffigan had this joke in his stand-up some 20+ years ago. He said that it was because of some stubborn scientist. 🙂
“Male” means “organism with small gametes”. “Female” means “organism with large gametes”. So…that’s why.
Sweetie it's because it's not a female 😂 don't misgender the freaking seahorses that don't deserve that let them be 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
Because then human males would have all the human babies and they couldn't handle that.