Wednesday, 19 August 2015

Animal Male Pregnancies???

Ok this may not be your everyday lunch topic but this happens to be ours today....lol..... Hmmm..... we all know the male sea horse  does that right? Or do we not... well we do... it's in the books somewhere I'm sure, might not be in your school text.... hmmm.... I cant remember...lol.... Anyway the thing was to name male animals that reproduce!

Dragon face Pipe Fish
Male pregnancy is a rare but real phenomenon in the animal kingdom. In some instances, male pregnancy is the result of man-made chemicals having strange effects on male frogs and bass, prompting weird intersex developments. In other situations, male pregnancy is a natural part of how seahorses, pipe-fish and leafy sea dragons reproduce. Whatever the case, males taking the reproductive roles of females provide bizarre and surprisingly fascinating studies.

Did you know that one of the most common weed killers can cause drastic changes in male frogs, transforming them into females that lay eggs? In a recent study, 40 male African clawed frogs  were raised from infancy to adulthood in a solution containing the chemical Atrazine, which is found in many weed killers. According to the study’s findings, 10 percent of the 40 frogs apparently developed into females. Upon dissection, 2 of the 4 transformed frogs maintained their male DNA despite also displaying ovaries. As for the other two transformed frogs, they mated with male frogs and laid eggs that produced male offspring. Previously, Atrazine had been shown to decrease sperm and testosterone and cause some male frogs to mate with other males rather than female frogs. Now it appears that the chemical can apparently cause some males to become near female frogs, a strange development to say the least.