A closer look
Male seahorses are the only creatures in the entire animal kingdom that experience pregnancy and physically give birth to offspring. During their elaborate courtship dance, the female carefully deposits thousands of her eggs directly into a specialized brood pouch located on the front of the male's abdomen. The male then single-handedly fertilizes the eggs, provides them with essential nutrients and oxygen, and carries them around for nearly a month while his belly hilariously swells to massive proportions. When the time finally comes, the exhausted father endures aggressive muscular contractions to violently shoot hundreds of fully formed miniature seahorses out into the dangerous ocean. This remarkable gender role reversal proves that nature is perfectly capable of letting males endure the absolute horrors of childbirth
