why do male sea horses have the babies and not the females? are they the only animals which do this?

Question

i dont understand how they are male if they have the childred, surely that is what would make them female!!! lol

Answer 1

The males only incubate and care for the babies. The females actually produce the eggs which they deposit in the male's brood pouch and which he then fertilises.

http://seahorse.fisheries.ubc.ca/biology5.html

Answer 2

Excellent question! Indeed, what does make a male a male and a female a female? The answer may sound terribly simple and perhaps surprising. We call the sex producing the larger gamete female. In other words, in sexual species, which ever sex produces germ cells that are bigger in size is the female sex.

In syngnathid fishes (species of the family in which you find sea horses, but also trumpet fish, needle fish etc.) the care for the eggs lies with the male parent. The female produces the larger gamete, the ovum (or egg), while the boys produce sperm, but in the end the males receive the eggs in their pouch and retain them in the pouch until the young hatch from the eggs. That males invest more in reproduction is not the norm, but it is not quite as rare as you may think. There are other species (amphibians, "reptiles" etc.) where the males are basically in charge of the offspring.

High male investment in offspring has not only reversed the behavior roles in terms of taking care of the brood, in syngnathid fishes it has also affected the way mates are chosen. As a rule of thumb, the sex that invests more into reproduction is the more picky one. To be sure, there are other reasons than that why individuals choose, and often both sexes are fairly selective in terms of their mate. But the general rule still holds to some degree. For sea horses, the theory would predict that males would be more selective when it comes to choosing female sex partners. And indeed, that is what experiments confirm.

The evolutionary reason for such an inversion of sex roles is not necessarily and entirly clear, but it is certainly nothing that challenges evolutionary theory, as one answerer suggested. (I recommend taking some intro classes into biology or perhaps reading some good introductory books on that topic...) As a matter of fact, one could ask why it is that the sex with the larger gametes also has to invest most in bringing up the offspring. There are some good answers to that, but since that was not your question, I'll hold back.

Answer 3

The sex of a seahorse is easy to detect: male seahorses have a pouch below the chest area.
Before the actual mating the male seahorse offers its waterfilled breeding bag over hours to the female again and again. It opens the input of the pouch extremely wide by a special movement. The female seahorse "docks" with the mid part of its body to the opening of the males pouch and fills in orange coloured eggs. Subsequently the male seahorse then sways the body in order to distribute the eggs in the pouch.
In seahorses pregnancy happens to the male animals. Within two or three weeks between 50 and 1.500 (!) seahorse babies develop inside the males pouch, which are finally living born. Frequently not all of the babies will dismiss at one time from the pouch, but in several phases over some minutes or hours, in extreme cases it takes even one or two days. Several males die a few days after birth of the ponies because of remaining dead babies in the pouch resulting in putrefaction and bacterial infection.

Answer 4

Male seahorses only technically look after the eggs. The female still accepts the sperm and produces the eggs, and the male gathers the eggs up and places them in his pouch. It looks like he is giving birth to live young, when in reality the eggs have just hatched.

There are other species of animals wheret he male is the primary care giver of the young.

Answer 5

The female seahorse lays eggs in the pouch of the male. So technically the male doesn't lay the eggs.

Answer 6

Simply because God is showing that a theory such as evolution could not explain such a phenomena. It just like the Platypus, has fur and gives milk like a mammal, but has webbed feet, duck bill and lays eggs like a bird. There are many such oddities in the natural world that tend to defy explanation.

Answer 7

they don't have the babies--at least in the female giving birth sense.

the females puts her eggs in the male's pouch, and there they become fertilized and grow, then he squirts them out the pouch when they are ready.