The Evolution of Seahorses
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 21 ก.ค. 2021
- Sea horses are amazing animals because of many of their strange features like male pregnancy but also due to their beautifully unique body shape. However, this may be the reason why seahorses are famous but it actually makes them very bad swimmers so why did they evolve to have this unique body shape?
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Sources:
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...
www.nature.com/articles/ncomm....
link.springer.com/article/10....
www.pnas.org/content/117/17/9431
Never thought I'd hear someone say that seahorses are "effective predators"
hahaha ÷)
''It doesn't matter how slow you go, as long as you don't stop'' - Confuscius
@@Goudhaantje1993 a great many people have said that to a great many exes... right before they stopped... for the last time.
F tier
They are effective Copepod hunters, but innefective anything else hunters
I once heard seahorse swimming is "like if you stood on a skateboard and flapped a Denny's menu behind you"
True Facts?
LOL
That's such an awesome description; I guess I'm gonna go snag some Denny's menus later
zefrank1?
@@Luksaee yep. Just watched it
Seahorses are bad at swimming? Then explain Kingdra's speed with Swift Swim.
Checkmate Moth Light Media
isn't kingdra a seadragon though? Like the cousins of seahorses
the difference is the dragon scales, irl ones would take them from F tier to A, maybe even S.
Have you ever seen a seahorse on land in the rain though? You haven't, because they're too fast for the human eye.
Wait guys I just realized that male kingdra would be the ones to carry horsea babies
@@potatobird52 I don’t know how to feel about that
"But despite of their strange appearance, they are actually just fish"
My disappointment is immesurable and my day is ruined
Right ? I always thought they followed a completely different lineage from other vertebrates
@@ocytocine96 exactly
I'm genuinely a little embarrassed that I never thought to ask what seahorses ARE. So they're fish...oh.
That’s how I feel too lmao
To be fair, despite your strange appearance, you're actually just a fish.
I have always loved seahorses and pipefish and leafy seadragons but I never thought about how they became the way they are so i am very interested now
The Dance of the Weedy Sea Dragons!! 🖤🐉🖤 it's one of the most beautiful things in the world
Congratulations
I was obsessed with seadragons as a kid
“Despite their strange shape they are basically still just fish” 😲
I don’t know why such a simple line just hit so different, Lol like wth did I think they were? Guess I never put much thought into it
It's because they look almost nothing like a fish. More like another type of animal all together
@@theace8502 Exactly, it’s like I would put them in another category of undersea creature all together but I guess biologically they are really fish, so interesting
@@Mr.Lubbox-Lobsterlegz1 I agree, very interesting
I know what you mean. When he said that I did a double-take and thought "fish"?? Really? Even with his diagrams it is hard to make the connections, but by the time he gets to the end he's got you convinced. I think this is the best channel on YT.
I'm glad I'm not alone in this
they're actualy more related to tuna than actual horses
🤯🤯🤯🤯
Bc they are fish and horses are mammals xd
@@SnubbyDaArtist yeah bc horses are lobe-finned fish and seahorses and tuna are ray-finned fish
😂
@@SnubbyDaArtist we got a genius here
Who refused the opportunity to call pipefish "seahoses"
😄
Seahorses are in my opinion the strangest creatures widely known
100%. They’re one of these animals we’re incredibly lucky to exist at the same time as, because if they were extinct we’d be blown away to imagine such an odd creature existing.
Ahem jellyfish
@@michaelblevins1651 was just about to say the same thing
@@michaelblevins1651 They're not that weird
@@bingolingo6555 their larva are stationary polyps on the seabed that repeatedly grow little jellyfish that pop off them
This male pregnancy strategy is pretty good but I think the reason other animals can't is cause bird and reptile eggs are too heavy and large to carry on the move, and for mammals well the female specs more to developing the young further than egg layers, and males would just over complicate the process.
Meanwhile fish only have to worry about things that eat the eggs, in water there's no risk of drying or having complex gestation, and so are very flexible.
Though in cases of dedicated fatherhood, I feel that is very apparent in several species across the board. Sometimes its a team effort like with birds (the responsibility increasing with predatory species who need to feed the chick more), or its like taking long shifts like penguins as one finds food.
African Bullfrog males, and Gharial males often stick around to care for a community's worth of children, sometimes cause they were unsuccessful or too young to mate.
And new to me is Male Gorillas and Male Tigers are actually very good fathers.
Even with the female absent or dead they put in a lot of work to care for their children and leading them around to safety or food.
If you're interested in animals with a lot of paternal investment, you should look up mouthbrooding fish. Not all species are male mouthbrooders, but a lot of them are, including several species of _Betta_ (same genus as the common bettas you find in pet stores). Mouthbrooding is pretty fascinating in general. In some female mouthbrooding species the females will pick up the eggs so soon after laying them that the male doesn't even have time to fertilize them, so the males have evolved egg spots on their anal fin to get the female to peck at it so their milt can get in her mouth to fertilize the eggs.
Male pregnancy essentially evolved from a basal form of parental care as you mentioned, whereby instead of looking after the eggs in a nest, like sticklebacks do, they likely at some point decided to pick them up and carry them around with them. This basal form is still present in some pipefish, you can literally see the evolution of the pouch through different pipefishes until you reach the most advanced in the seahorse. If you think their male pregnancy is interesting, you should read about their immune systems... hands down the most bizarre and incredible creatures
It's interesting to think of a mammal that could lay its "eggs" in the male's body, which his sperm then fertilized and he became pregnant, rather than the other way around.
I think it'd be difficult for mammals due to the whole placenta thing. And the fact that we typically come with an innie and an outtie pair.
Saying ‘the male gets pregnant’ isn’t quite right, surely. The male can gestate the eggs and carry the babies but he doesn’t ‘get pregnant’.
'Despite everything, it's still fish.'
All vertebrates ever
Shared pregnancy is probably one of the coolest traits in the animal kingdom. Thank you Moth Light Media!
Why is that called pregnancy though? It's pretty much similar to how male birds sit on eggs except underwater you gotta carry them around with you
@@consensus949 because they carry the eggs inside of themselves. “At the end of a gestation period usually lasting from two to four weeks, the pregnant male's abdominal area begins to undulate rhythmically, and strong muscular contractions eject from a few dozen to as many as 1,000 fully formed baby seahorses into the surrounding water.” I don’t think the metaphor is accurate at all, considering they give birth.
@@junhwe9289most male animals always afraid what if your offspring you have happen to be not yours.
In case of them no problem.
@@andrewgan557 what???????? The female deposits the eggs inside of the males and the male fertilizes them. So yeah, they’re his. If I’m understanding what you wrote at all
@@junhwe9289 I'm saying no wonder why other animals particularly the males if they suspect the offspring wasn't his they often kill the babies. In case of the sea horses cause the male both fertilize and carry the eggs he certainly knows that's his offspring he's carrying.
I had never heard of Sea Dragons before I saw one at an aquarium, and I was transfixed. They are such fascinating creatures
I look forward to these vids, maybe more than any others on the tube
Which tube
I can't believe this came out on the day when I saw a marine biologist react to tierzoo's fish ranking list video and agreeing with him on the ranking of seahorses as trash.
This was incredibly informative, and I have gained back all of my respect for these strange creatures.
@@abhignavijjapurapu209 Yeah. I didn't really get much of an -ologist vibe from him. But he did say he was a "real fish biologist" so I kind of assumed he wouldn't straight up lie.
@Lex Bright Raven more like class, not player
@@abhignavijjapurapu209 the youtuber is AVNJ, he is an actual marine biologist
TierZoo gives a very warped view of why animals evolve the way they do, it's not about being the most powerful animal but rather filling a niche successfully.
It’s AVNJ, he does fish observing for river fish, which is why he’s seemingly less knowledgable about ocean fish
Less than 0.1% of their young survive to adulthood...
That's one hell of a child mortality rate there. o.O
Octopi are also startling
Makes me wonder how they even exist at all
It's actually a very low mortality rate for fish. There are a few who have a lower rate but not many. And I believe it's 1% not 0.1%
@@mushmush4980 exactly, it seems like a miracle that any complex life exists at all, let alone be robust enough to give birth to another organism that somehow inherits complex behaviour that is encoded in genes???
Like everything seems so contingent on a billion different things and yet that’s just the way life works and it seems to work really well. It often feels like the more I learn the less I really understand
Quantity over quality is heavily utilized in the animal kingdom, it's called k-selection. The numbers are probably pretty close to other animals like mosquitos, which lay 1000s of eggs but only a dozen or so make it.
OH MY GOD IVE BEEN BEGGING PBS EONS TO MAKE A VIDEO ON THIS AND YOU BEAT THEM TO IT YOU'RE INCREDIBLE
Give this man a cookie🍪🍪🍪
*David Attenborough voice* The most vicious of undersea predators, these monsters use their long, strong tail to grasp tightly onto sea grass in order to ensnare their prey.
Seahorses are convergent with chameleons. Ambush predators of small prey with very good camouflage and a priehensile tail.
Haha, not a bad parallel. One could also say they are like mantises. They mimic plants for camouflage in shape as well as color.
I was wondering how these things evolved, nice to see a vid about it
Gotta raise it to level 32 for it to evolve. After that, gotta trade it with a dragon scale for it to evolve again.
I love how nature works. Literally a perfect balance. This otherwise clumsy fish adapted so specifically to hunt a very particular organism. This hyper-specialization also means the seahorse is extremely vulnerable to extinction should the source of food evolve or go extinct. Then another 20 million years down the line, a similar fish would evolve to fill a similar niche. Awesome
Copepods have arguably the biggest biomass of all animals, and their are more than twice as many copepod species as mammal species.
@@eljanrimsa5843 ig they aren't going extinct then. Hopefully climate change doesn't mess things up tho
If they were able to swim around the world at the pace of the tectonic plates for millions of years, are y'all scared of climate change? 😆 🤣
I’m in love with the seahorses.
Sea horse sea hell
@@tylerharder4320 not my chair. not my problem.
When I was a little kid we had a pair of sea horses in our aquarium, always thought there was something magical about them.
I feel like TierZoo needs to watch this video
is this a safe space to say that tierzoo gets too caught up in his video-gamification of the natural world and often forgets that every living thing is the best adapted creature to its environment, often to the determent to the beautiful creatures that aren't flashy predators? I mean don't get me wrong, I like his videos, but I feel like he intentionally oversimplifies evolutionary biology and doesn't adjust for his bias towards "easier to sum up in two sentences" creatures. He also somehow forgot to include seagulls on the tier list of birds? Like, how is that even possible?
At the end of the day, TierZoo is entertainment. One shouldn't take it too seriously.
Though admittedly, the constant underrating of hadrosaurs still annoys me.
Someone need to comment something interesting in tierzoo's latest video and then drop this video's link when he responded.
Come on, I thought everyone thought Tierzoo being biased towards aggro was the entire premise ;)
@Hernando Malinche true that, he seems to think success means being at the very top of the food chain, whilst success actually is just surviving.
I live in Louisiana and was recently cast netting at an in shore salt marsh when I pulled up a pipe fish. I had never seen a wild seahorse before, so I was surprised to find one so far from the ocean.
Wild seahorse?
@@lapsstudent vs one in an aquarium
@@Cillana I forgot that this comment existed but thanks for the reply
Sea horses are one of those real life creatures that just seem science fiction
You’re science fiction
well real life does give us more than enough "alien" lifeforms.
Bobbit worms, Antlions, Lionfish
Sometime in the future:
Millions of years ago one and only one species of Sea Horse (the only vertebrate) was introduced to the Mega Boreal Sea of Mars.
Now, let's view the result.
Spot the Serina: A Natural History of the World of Birds reference!
Today I Learned, seahorses are related to pipe fish and trumpet fish.
Edit: and that the males of all of these species are the ones who give birth
yeah I've always been taught that only the seahorse does that. Kinda baffling to know that an entire species is capable of male pregnancy.
There are a few mouth brooding fish species where the male carries the eggs, and you see egg carrying in a couple of frog species too (one notably has vocal sac pregnancies!). I believe there are also some water bugs where males carry eggs...? Not sure on that one. While the belly sack resemblance of seahorse pregnancy is remarkable in its own right, male pregnancy analogs are unusual but not unique to sygnathids :> love your videos as always, keep em coming!
They're so cute and I hope they live forever
Literally started researching seahorses on the net today, and I find this video uploaded just yesterday. What a lovely coincidence.
I love your channel m8, the soft ambient music, calming pictures and videos plus your not all in your face. like some of the other channels that do this kind of videos
This was a great episode. I've always been fascinated by seahorses, their shape and manner of swimming is so strange, but they are wonderfully graceful doing it. The relationships between the different members of this family is also amazing; that they have male pregnancy, are ambush predators (which I never would have thought of, I thought they were vegetarians!) The "suck-'em-up" style of eating is used by other creatures, but not the sneak attack as well. Thanks a bunch for this most entertaining and educational video.
These videos are what keep me going; keep up the awesome work man!
your video s always help me fall asleep on bad nights, so thank you!
Wonderful video. I have always loved seahorses and sea dragons. They are as dorky as they are beautiful.
this was amazing and I love all the members of this family including the sticklebacks but of course especially the sea horse and sea dragons
Fascinating. Really high quality video that was well researched, well done.
So informative thankyou!!! No other seahorse video ever describes how they actually came to be nor the purpose for it!
Great content as always. Thank you for this. :)
You've quickly became one of my favorite channels these last few months
Been looking forward to another video
I use TH-cam only for music and basically never sub to anyone yet I still look forward to these videos and watch them whenever they come out
Great video! I really enjoyed watching this! 😉👍
Amazing story. Thank you.
About time someone did a video on this thank you so much!
Another great one. Thanks!
A truly strange, bizarre, and absolutely beautiful creature, yet isn’t that true for all life?
May I assume that you never have seen a picture of a naked mole-rat? I would give it the points for strange and bizarre, but not for beautiful. 😉
@@Andreas_42 yeah it’s beautiful.
Love these guys so much i have one tattooed on my ankle!💕
Wow.
This video really made me know more about sea horses.
Its cool that they arent just evolutions mistake but are very special in biology and have adapted very good solutions.
In my opinion this is the best channel on TH-cam
They're such beautiful little creatures
"Seahorses are actually just fish."
You sit on a throne of lies.
Okay. Where did they evolve from them? Please don't say dog did it.
@@bazpearce9993 we are also fish
@@bazpearce9993 You're bad at detecting obvious jokes.
@@eviljoel You're bad at being annoying.
@@bazpearce9993 Calm down. It's okay if you didn't get the joke. No need to get defensive.
Love this channel
I'm in love with your channel. It would be awesome a video of your talking about homeothermy in mammals and dinosaurs!
Love to watch these videos, specially before sleep
very interesting as always!
YEESSS NEW VIDEO!! Hope you're doing great!
This is awesome. Thank you so much.
Found your channel a few weeks ago and I can't stop watching your videos. The quality of content is superb! Your documentaries make you realise that 1000 years for example... is nothing compared to millions and millions of years of evolution of organisms
Another great video
Holy cow I love this channel
Awesome video :)
Great video
Quality content as per usual
Thank you. Sea Dragons are my favorite fish. Of course, it helps that the first submarine I was stationed on was SSN-584-USS Seadragon.
Thanks that was interesting
Fascinating! In the 60s seahorse pins were popular to wear on your dress. Oriented to kids mainly. Thinking back now - weird!!
Looooove your channel. Cheers from Puerto Rico 🇵🇷
Amazing video as always! Please feature how the spider and its web evolved soon. Thank you! :-)
I learned alot,thanks!.
Ty
Wow great video. Value!
It is nice to see the evolution of this unique organism.
When I was was little I used to think they are mythical / fairytale creatures like unicorns, dragons and fairies!
i have been wondering about this for so long
Yep, you heard the man right. Tuna are indeed closer related to seahorses than to, say, salmon or swordfish. Talk about divergent AND convergent evolution. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percomorpha
HELL YEAH NEW MOTH LIGHT MEDIA VIDEO!!! LETS GO!!! QUIETLY EDUCATE ME ABOUT SEAHORSE EVOLUTION WITH DOPE ILLUSTRATIONS!!!
Fascinating
seahorses are adorable!! I always knew that they were just fish
with a different shaped body.
Seahorses are very bizarre! Great video!
Whoever said seahorses are F tier wasn’t charting animals based off of how successful they are but by how fun they are to play.
yay another moth light media
Seahorses are one of those things that seem totally commonplace but then you think about them for a while, and eventually you find yourself wondering what the heck aliens are going to look like when life here on *earth* can be so totally weird.
We have enough life that is arguably "alien" to us already!
Bobbit worms, Antlions, stick insects.
Imagine any of those just bigger and they would fit perfectly well into any sci-fi movie
Seahorses may be the only ones where the males carry the young in their pouch, but there are a number of species that delegate care of the eggs or young to the male. The unique adaptation is the pouch.
im an oyster fisherman in CT. we pull up little brown sea horses from time to time. extremely delicate creatures
This sure was awesome MLM video on the evolution on the *worst fish main ever* also I wish y'all a great day.
This is an exceptionally interesting episode. I never really thought about seahorse evolution. C:
Literally every time I see a notif from this channel I click on it immediately. You always choose super off the wall but interesting topics. I get as excited for your stuff as I do when PBS Eons posts.
Seahorse evolution awesome! Always wondered about these wierd fish.
This is very intresting because I always thought that sea dragons were a type of seahorse.
something tells me that far in the future someones gonna find a seahorse fossil and think it swam like a regular fish
What I am still puzzled about is the evolutionary process it took to "switch places" regarding the pregnancy part... Since all evolution starts with tiny tiny differences in one or a few individuals I always wonder how such tiny differences could/can prove to have such a big impact. Big enough to help those individuals survive. How did the male pouch start to evolve since obviously they originally did not have a hole there. And all the way to supplying nutrients from within the pouch, having "contractions" etc. It's so amazing and I can't grasp the time and thousands or millions of generations it takes to be "evolution"
Imagine if seahorses evolved to hunt larger prey?
Like, just this giant snoot coming up from the deep to suck sea birds off the surface or something.
What I find extremely funny is the fact that AVNJ, a ichthyologist who makes fish content on YT, is completely baffled by the fact that sea horses even exist.
Ive always wondered this
I don't know why I always forget that seahorses exist. They're pretty iconic animals.
You could have easily lied to me and told me they were Arthropods and I would have believed you. I had no idea they were fish and I feel foolish for never thinking about it before.
Nice video, hope all of you are having a great day. Keep moving forward, and succeed.
'Despite their strange appearance, they are actually just fish, and their ancestors dating back many millions of years ago would have been completely recognizable as regularly-shaped fish' - also true of regular horses
We are all fish 🙂