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Wednesdays' Weirdos: Seahorse

Today I met with my favorite adult protection client and she was updating me on her online dating progress. I'm pleased to hear she has a new man and they have much in common when somehow in the course of our conversation she tells me she used to raise seahorses!

When she tells me this, I completely lose all pretense with regard to professionalism and am all "Nu, uh! No way, really?" And then I get her to tell me all about raising seahorses.

seahorse

She tells me that you order a pregnant male.
Yes, pregnant male.
At this point I start to worry that maybe my favorite APS client might be a crust shy of a pizza. So I clarify, "MALE... pregnant sea horse? What makes him male then?"

She shrugs and then describes making the salt water and how all these baby sea horses, like a hundred, burst from the male and go swimming around. Apparently baby seahorses are called 'fry' an unfortunate name, way too tasty sounding to mean simply 'baby.' There is a difference between calling your kid 'small fry' and 'tasty looking steak.' Her pet bird at the time apparently agreed with me and ate almost all the babies. She said he was like the bird you see bobbing in drinks, only he was eating her FRIES!
DrinkingBird
We talk about seahorses and her online boyfriend for a little longer and then I take her home feeling pleased with my day.

So when I get back to the office, I look it up.

Turns out she's RIGHT! The female sea horse deposits HER fertilized eggs into a sac in the male sea horse and he keeps 'em in there until they hatch and then out they go. You can check for yourself here. Or watch this weird video

I'm not sure why the embedding is disabled on this video but feel like I've accomplished something by finding something bizarre enough to have embedding disabled on it. Doesn't it have a weird Pee Wee's Playhouse feel to it?

Making them this week's Wednesday's Weirdo: Male Seahorses.

Incidentally, I tried talking Rob into carrying around a mucus sac with the parasite, you know, once there IS a parasite and he gave me an indescribable look that clearly meant, "No." And he hadn't even seen the PeeWee's Pervhouse Seahorse Birthing video. I'm not sure what's wrong with me, I've probably watched it half a dozen times now.

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