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Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Science Vocabulary #3: Brood pouch


A brood puch is a sealed picket, located on a male sea horse's tail, in which the little seahorse babies grow. (I'm writing a book on seahorses, and reading a reference book about them to help me, which is why I talked about breeding season yesterday and "brood pouch" today!)

Of course not only seahorses have brood pouches.

First off, what's a brood? "a number of young produced or hatched at one time; a family of offspring or young"

With birds, "to sit upon (eggs) to hatch, as a bird; incubate." The same goes for seahorses, who "incubate" their eggs in their brood pouch.

Some animals have pouches in which they carry their young. The kangaroo carries her baby (called a joey) in her pouch.

The seahorse is a very interesting creature. It is a member of the Syngnathidae family (Syngnathidae is a long word, which comes from the Greek. Don't worry about it now!), which consists of seahorses, the pipefishes, and the weedy and leafy sea dragons. Every other species on earth, that we know of, that has male and female members of the species, has the female become pregnant. Not so the seahorse, pipefish and sea dragon.

In these three species, and in these three alone, out of the millions on the earth, it is the male becomes pregnant.

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