Robby Whitley, age 12, of High Point, North Carolina, for his question:
Does the male sea horse really give birth?
Baby sea horses are born alive and all ready to go, go, go. And yes, indeed, it is the male sea horse who gives birth to them. This is not merely a clever trick. The eggs are fertilized and the embryos develop in a special pouch on his stomach. After a month or so, the frisky youngsters emerge in ones, twos and threes. As a rule, the male sea horse is exhausted after giving birth to perhaps 200 or so live babies.
It seems that nature selected the sea horse to prove that in the animal kingdom just about anything is possible. He ranges from two to eight inches long and he looks like the armored knight from a chess set. Almost half of his length is a supple, prehensile tail which he coils around his sheltering seaweeds. He can turn and bend his horsy neck and his horsy nose is a tubular mouth. He can swivel around each of his turreted eyes to get different views of his watery world.
These oddities are remarkable, but not nearly as remarkable as his sex life. For not only does the male sea horse give birth to live babies., biologists suspect that the developing embryos are supplied with oxygen and nourishment while inside his body. Throughout the rest of the animal kingdom, of course, these duties are allocated to the females.
The family life of the sea horse begins when the female prepares to lay her eggs. At this time she grows a finger like organ called an ovipositor. Meantime the male prepares the roomy brood pouch which is situated on his bulging little stomach. During a tail entwining courtship, the female uses her ovipositor to deposit perhaps 200 tiny eggs through an opening in his brood pouch.
After this, the carefree female goes on her way. The opening to the male's brood pouch shrinks to a tiny pore. The eggs inside are fertilized and nestle down to develop in the soft spongy tissue that lines its walls. For the next four or five weeks, the patient father endures a bulging tummy, full of kicking babies.
The actual birth of the babies turns out to be a great ordeal. The sea horse jerks and bends his small body and when possible rubs his swollen tummy against a stone. At last the first tiny babe is pushed through the door. The weary father takes a rest but the laborious event has barely begun.
Between rests, he bends, jerks and pushes until his whole brood comes popping out in ones, twos or threes. When the last of the brood is born, the father collapses from complete exhaustion. Though each of his offspring measures only about a quarter of an inch, all are able to take care of themselves.
When kept in an aquarium, the male sea horse often dies after his childbirth ordeal. In the sea he stands a better chance. It seems that he is more likely to survive if right away his pouch is filled with another brood: The poor male sea horse is almost always pregnant.