my seahorses are confused...

[teemee]

I have two male H. erectus, 1 female H. erectus, and 1 female H. reidi.
But instead of the males mating with the females, I've just witnessed the males doing the 'dance' that a male and female will do when the egg transfer takes place. what to do? any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Allmost]

call the church ?

maybe they are in collage and just experimenting

lol sorry I could not resist.

 

[Paul B]

Show them this picture of mine transfering eggs.

 

[tjdouglas]

Dear Teemee,

My male seahorse would also often engage in mating dances with one another, especially when they were younger. One study conducted at Sea Life Centre in the UK found that male seahorses in captivity displayed almost as much sexual interest with each other as they did with females (out of 3168 observed sexual liasons between seahorses, 37% of them were same sex pairings). So your male seahorses are not actually engaging in unusual behavior relative to other male seahorses in captivity. Furthermore, this does not mean that your males will never mate with females. They probably will since those nosy scientists at Sea Life Centre have found that most seahorses seem to engage in some bisexual activity (or at least the ones in captivity do).

You can check out more info on this seahorse sex study here: http://www.martinfrost.ws/htmlfiles/feb2007/seahorse.html

 

[DanU]

You should find that as they mature, you will see less and less of same sex pairing. We see this a lot with younger specimens but it is not as common as they get older. Young males are anxious to try to figure things out.

Dan

 

[btreyes]

lol!

 

[teemee]

thanks everyone!
I'm reassured to know that things will sort themselves out over the long term.
And that there may be seahorse babies in the cards, one day

 

[Devaji108]

call the church ?

maybe they are in collage and just experimenting

lol sorry I could not resist.

haha best thinkgI read all day!