Reproduction Process of Seahorses
How much do you know about seahorses? Do you know how they reproduce? Many people may misunderstand that seahorse is a kind of horse, but it is actually a kind of fish. More importantly, unlike most other creatures, seahorses are reproduced by males. The process of how seahorses reproduce requires going through three stages from mating to reproduction.
Before breeding baby seahorses, male and female seahorse have to perform complex courtship ritual. During courtship ritual, both of them may change their body colors, swim side by side, and finally have their tails intertwined. The longest courtship ritual can even last for eight hours.
After courtship ritual, the female seahorse will lay thousands of zygotes in male’s brood pouch. In this process, the male and female seahorse will face each other with their abdomen, and the female seahorse will insert its oviduct into the brood pouch of the male seahorse in order to lay the zygotes. At this time, male seahorse’s brood pouch will form a thick vascular rete, which is closely connected to the embryonic vascular rete, in order to supply nutrient for zygotes.
During gestation, the male seahorse will move to shallow water finding a more suitable reproduction environment. After finding a suitable environment, it will need to take 9 to 45 days for the male seahorse to confront the first childbirth. As the childbirth approaches, the male seahorse will not only breathe quickly but also begin to change its skin color. After a while, his abdomen will start to contract forcefully, sometimes he even impacts solid objects with his abdomen to speed up the reproduction process. Finally thousands of baby seahorses are born one after another, and their body length is about 0.6 to 1 cm.
In the end, through the aforementioned process of mating, ovulation, and reproduction, we can know that even though male seahorses give birth to baby seahorses, the fact is that the brood pouches of male seahorses only serve as incubators, and the spawns still originate from female seahorses. So the statement that seahorses are reproduced by males is not completely correct. However, what is surprising is that once the baby seahorses mature and born, the male seahorse that has just reproduced in the morning may get pregnant again at night. Then, the new cycle of reproduction begins.
