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Short snouted seahorses are considered ovoviviparous meaning that the female deposits eggs into a pouch on the males stomach, called a brood pouch, and the male goes through pregnancy and labour. [9] Sexual maturation occurs during the first reproductive season after birth.
Adult seahorses eat 30 to 50 times a day if food is available; due to their slow consumption they must feed constantly to survive. [20] Big-belly seahorses do not have a stomach or teeth, so they feed by sucking small invertebrates in through their bony tubular snouts with a flick of their head. Their snouts can expand if the prey is larger ...
When mating, the female seahorse deposits up to 1,500 (average of 100 to 1,000) eggs in the male's pouch, located on the ventral abdomen at the base of the tail. Male juveniles develop pouches when they are 5–7 months old. The male carries the eggs for 9 to 45 days until the seahorses emerge fully developed, but very small.
Seahorses range in size from 1.5 to 35 cm (0.6 to 13.8 in). [13] They are named for their equine appearance, with bent necks and long snouted heads and a distinctive trunk and tail. Although they are bony fish, they do not have scales, but rather thin skin stretched over a series of bony plates, which are arranged in rings throughout their bodies.
Seahorses are renowned for mating for life, with the male carrying the eggs. But after following three male pygmies and one female for weeks, Smith discovered that the sex lives of the smaller ...
Pregnant male seahorse. Male pregnancy is the incubation of one or more embryos or fetuses by organisms of the male sex in some species. Most species that reproduce by sexual reproduction are heterogamous—females producing larger gametes and males producing smaller gametes ().
Male seahorses have a specialized ventral brood pouch to carry the embryos, male sea dragons attach the eggs to their tails, and male pipefish may do either, depending on their species. [4] The most fundamental difference between the different lineages of the family Syngnathidae is the location of male brood pouch. [ 5 ]
The histological structure of their intestine is similar to that of seahorse species that also lack a stomach (agastric teleosts) such as the H. abdomnialis and the H. guttulatus. Thus, these species may have split from each other from a common ancestor, but more than just morphological data would be needed to confirm this observation. [11]