I've seen a clip of a seahorse giving birth. It was a little unnerving. Not because it was a male, as happens to be the case in that corner of the animal kingdom. You can't really tell the gender. It's just because it goes on so long, and so many embryonic fish come out at once.
But that's how it is among a lot of creatures. In fact for the most part parenting, the personal raising of young that you get to know, is limited to the higher vertebrates (i.e. mammals, birds, and reptiles.) To us, nature itself can be scary.
2 comments:
I remember being stunned by a similar clip about seahorses long ago. It's got to be pretty rare among any species for makes to gestate the young although I doubt they pay much attention to the babies after the fact.
One of the more bizarre things I've learned recently about animal behaviour is that seagulls will attack the nests of other gulls if the parent birds leave for any reason. We'd been thinking the reason for lots of screeching late at night was that a cat or raccoon had got on a roof, but nooo, that probably wasn't the reason at all. Nature can indeed be scary.
Yeah, the thing about having offspring in that number is that in essence your job is done. You don't have to do any raising, because there are enough to cover your losses if any should die prematurely, which some will. And the others are genetically programmed to know how to live.
Weird that seagulls have this habit of attacking the vacant nests of other gulls. Obviously it's not a real friendly behavior. Which is probably the point. It's nature's way of making sure they don't nest too close to each other.
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