In nearly all animal species, females are tasked with the responsibility of childbearing where they carry their offspring until its time to birth them. With this being said, there is a handful of species’ where the males perform this function including pipefish, leafy seadragons, and seahorses.
A pair of divers who were carrying out research on seahorses were lucky enough to capture rare footage of one heavily pregnant male giving birth in the wild.
Meagan Abele and Clayton Manning were researching seahorses in the waters of Port Stephens, Australia when they came across a male seahorse in the process of birthing tiny seahorses. Although videos of this sort are common, none have been captured in the wild.
The divers stumbled upon this male during their fourth dive and happen to be in the right place at the right time to see newborn seahorses emerge from the male’s brood pouch.
Clayton wrote about the experience saying, “It’s pretty cool to be a part of something so rare, so when Meagan (my research assistant who took the footage) and I stopped filming, we high-fived and went to the surface. We were positively beaming; not because we’d captured the birth, but because we’d seen it with our very eyes.”
Clayton Manning and his research assistant Meagan Abele, from The University of British Columbia, Canada, were only four dives into their study when they were lucky enough to witness the rare event.
Although videos of seahorses giving birth are nothing new, all have been filmed in captivity until now. “This is the first time it has been captured in the wild,” said Clayton. “It’s pretty cool to be a part of something so rare, so when Meagan and I stopped filming, we high-fived and went to the surface. We were positively beaming”.
Seahorses are unique in that the males are responsible for carrying the pregnancy and giving birth. After a ritualised courtship dance, the female deposits her eggs into the male’s pouch, where they are fertilised and develop into fully formed miniature seahorses before being ejected out of the pouch.
The species in the video, the Whites or Sydney seahorse (Hippocampus whitei) breeds between October and March, and males give birth multiple times during the breeding season. “The pregnancy lasts around three weeks, and can result in approximately 100-250 offspring,” said Clayton, who is investigating what type of environmental characteristics makes for good seahorse habitat.
According to Clayton, while Australian populations of seahorses are doing well, populations globally are not. Habitat loss, indirect catch (usually by shrimp trawlers), and direct catch for traditional medicine (largely in Asia) are their biggest threats.