• NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    25·
    3 months ago

    Serious question: how are male and female defined, and why does the sea horse that gets pregnant count as male and not female?

    • Varyk@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      37·
      3 months ago

      it sounds like they consider a male seahorse a male because he produces sperm rather than eggs.

      The female seahorse drops her eggs off into a male brood pouch, a little pocket the male seahorse has on the front of him that has a placenta in it, and then he fertilizes those eggs and carries the fetuses for a few weeks and then little seahorses flutter out when he gives birth.

      there’s a video. and it’s a LOT of baby flutterhorses

      https://animals.howstuffworks.com/fish/male-seahorses-give-birth.htm

    • aziEnglish
      11·
      3 months ago

      Male is the sex that produces the smaller gamete, female the sex that produces the larger

    • flora_explora@beehaw.orgEnglish
      7·
      3 months ago

      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!

      • Shhalahr@beehaw.orgEnglish
        5·
        3 months ago

        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.

    • jol@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      71·
      3 months ago

      The male doesn’t get pregnant. It’s like a kangaroo with a pouch to carry the babies.

      • flora_explora@beehaw.orgEnglish
        41·
        3 months ago

        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?

            • jol@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
              3·
              3 months ago

              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.

              • Shhalahr@beehaw.orgEnglish
                2·
                3 months ago

                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.