Author: Conall Kavanagh (---.ucsd.edu)
Date: 05-02-2002 13:38
Hello,
Neat article on fertility. For the record, there is such a thing as male pregnancy. In seahorses, the roles in pregnancy are completely switched between the sexes. The female uses an organ to deposit her eggs into the male's brood pouch. In essence, the female uses her "penis" to deposit her gametes (unfertilized eggs) into the male's "uterus" (although the male's brood pouch does not have "umbilical cords" that connect the babies' and parent's bloodstream). Once in the pouch, the eggs are fertilized by the male's sperm. The male then incubates the developing embryos over so many weeks, and they hatch out of his pouch.
Maybe someone can adapt this biological system for their RPG, if so inclined.
As with all sexual animals, what makes a female "female" is her relative investment in the gametes. Females must yolk up larger, costier eggs as opposed to the males' sperm. The "male" and "female" stages of hermaphroditic fish and molluscs are characterized by the type of gametes being produced: eggs rich in lipids and protein, or smaller mobile sperm.
Parental care is more or less irrelevant to being "male" or "female" overall -- all kinds of male fish and insects guard clutches of eggs, sometimes while trying to get more females to mate with them! Of course, physiology may dictate that the fertilized egg remains in the female's body for so long (as in mammals), but who minds the hatchings/kids is a very fluid game in many animal groups.
Regards,
Conall Kavanagh
-- Zoologist by day, gamer by night.
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