eli5 why seahorse males are male.

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Why are male seahorses male if they do the role of bearing and birthing the children? What defines male and female in this sense? Considering female seahorses are the ones that deposit the unfertilised eggs and seahorses then fertilise and bear them? It seems almost like the seahorse female does the job of a human male in that regard, by depositing gametes, which are then fertilised in the human female that then bears the children and births them, so how did scientists decide that seahorses are female and the males birth the young?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Biology is weird. Gametes that are large and few are usually called eggs; gametes that are small, numerous (and only sometimes mobile – for example, pollen is not self-mobile) are sperm.

Females make eggs, males make sperm (not counting hermaphroditism or intersex or ovotestes or all the other things, ELI5) and in this case the male/female is assigned by gamete production, even though the roles are switched from typical (female deposits eggs, male fertilizes and births the babies).

This is not a hard and fast rule. There are some species that might have more than two sexes based on multiple gamete sizes (e.g. female, male1, male2)

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