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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Lots of species of animals produce two kinds of gametes, which are kind of half-cells that combine and grow into a new animal. Human eggs and sperm are gametes. Some gametes are small (like sperm), others are large (like eggs), and you generally need one of each to produce a new animal. We call the animals that produce small gametes males, and we call the ones that produce large gametes females. In some species, it’s possible for one individual to produce both kinds of gametes, and we call them hermaphrodites. What happens after the gametes meet up and start growing into a new animal doesn’t determine the sex of the parents, only the size of the gametes does that.
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