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?
In: 3
A sperm isn’t a sperm because it is made by a male, and an egg isn’t an egg because it is made by a female. Rather it is the inverse: a male is a male because it produces sperm gametes, and a female is a female because it produces egg gametes.
Male seahorses are male because they produce sperm. Female seahorses are female because they produce eggs.
The fact that the fertilization happens inside a cavity created by the male, and the male cares for the embryos as they develop, doesn’t have anything to do with the sex of the seahorse. It just seems weird to us because most of the time we find the opposite arrangement in nature: usually the producer of the larger, more metabolically expensive, eggs, brood the young.
Latest Answers