If it has testicles doesn’t that make it a male? Does it have a uterus? How is a baby able to grow if not in a uterus?
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You are right, the sea horse does not have a uterus, and so doesn’t give birth in the same sense that mammals do. Most fish lay eggs externally, but some fish have evolved methods of keeping the developing young with them for protection. Like with mamals, male sea horses produce sperm, and females produce eggs. But the male sea horse has a special pouch in his digestive tract where he swallows and stores the fertilized eggs. When the eggs hatch, he barfs up the young. Unlike mammals the male doesn’t provide any nutrients to the developing eggs, he just stores them internally.
The male seahorse actually has a pouch. The female deposits the eggs in the pouch and the make fertilizes them. So yes the male fertilizes the eggs and gives birth.
Instead of depositing sperm into the female the way mammals do, seahorses do the opposite. The males have a brood pouch that the female deposits eggs into. The seahorse’s brood pouch is different from the mammalian uterus, but it effectively does the same job.
Most fish utilize *external fertilization*: the male releases a cloud of sperm into the water, and the female deposits her eggs into the cloud. Seahorse reproduction is essentially a variation on this theme, except that the cloud of sperm is released into the male’s pouch rather than the open water. The male actually has to fill the pouch with seawater first, or the sperm won’t release. Then the female uses her ovipositor to deposit the eggs into the cloud, which happens to be in the pouch.
And that’s pretty much it. The male’s pouch isn’t like the mammalian uterus, which most mammals use to nourish their embryos as they grow. Nor is it like the pouch marsupials use to provide milk to their joeys. It’s just a safe place for the eggs to develop and hatch.
the mother lays her eggs into a storage pouch on the father’s belly and says “here babe hang onto these ok?”.
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