Serious question: how are male and female defined, and why does the sea horse that gets pregnant count as male and not female?
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
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Male is the sex that produces the smaller gamete, female the sex that produces the larger
Usually animals are categorized as male and female based on what type of gametes their gonads produce. So male sea horses produce sperm.
~~Not sure how to count the "pregnancy" though, as these are fish and because of the following:~~
The male seahorse is equipped with a brood pouch on the ventral, or front-facing, side of the tail. When mating, the female seahorse deposits up to 1,500 eggs in the male's pouch. The male carries the eggs for 9 to 45 days until the seahorses emerge fully developed, but very small. The young are then released into the water, and the male often mates again within hours or days during the breeding season
From Wikipedia
E: the wiki article goes on to talk about pregnant sea horses, so yeah, they are pregnant and they do get impregnated by female sea horses!
The young are then released into the water, and the male often mates again within hours or days during the breeding season
Oh, god. They have a pregnancy fetish.
The male doesn't get pregnant. It's like a kangaroo with a pouch to carry the babies.
Except that in cangaroos the mother actually needs to be pregnant and birth its babies first. In sea horses the female directly lays the eggs inside the pouch of the male, impregnating it, and the male then undergoes pregnancy. So actually very different to kangaroos?
No, it's exactly like kangaroos. /s...
My point was that it is nothing like in kangaroos. The comparison is just misleading.
It's like kangaroos in the sence that it's a pouch not a uterus. Some fish put eggs in a cave, but that doesn't make the cave pregnant.
Pregnancy has been traditionally defined as the period of time eggs are incubated in the body after the egg-sperm union.[1] Although the term often refers to placental mammals, it has also been used in the titles of many international, peer-reviewed, scientific articles on fish, e.g. Consistent with this definition, there are several modes of reproduction in fish, providing different amounts of parental care
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pregnancy_in_fish
Going off of this, it's just a matter of the term "pregnancy" being co-opted to describe something completely different from what it means in its original context. As does happen, even in science.
Seahorses are the aliens we know.
A t4t heterosexual couple 💕
T4t?
Trans for trans
I wish I was a seahorse 😮💨
Do you have that image without text?