Is male(?) Nyrean Steele supposed to get pregnant in the conventional sense? Wasn't aware that male Nyrea had both ovaries and sperm sacs. Kinda sounds like a breeding nightmare to me. (Or wet dream 
)
)Nyrean Steele
- Thread starter Izanesting
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Well, they do in the same sense as seahorse males (i.e. after the female takes the sperm up her ovipositor, she lays her eggs right back in the pouch). It's most common for Nyrean females to lay their eggs in the males they took the sperm from. That's how Seifyn and the other male Nyreans carried children after all.
What, did you have a male Nyrean Steele get pregnant from a regular copulation? XD If that's the case, that might be a coding error/oversight since Nyrean vaginas are the odd ones out of all possible vaginas in the game (i.e. having sperm sacs instead of ovaries).
What, did you have a male Nyrean Steele get pregnant from a regular copulation? XD If that's the case, that might be a coding error/oversight since Nyrean vaginas are the odd ones out of all possible vaginas in the game (i.e. having sperm sacs instead of ovaries).
That would actually be why I'm inquiring here. I'm well aware of the breeding patterns of the Nyrea, but wasn't sure if it was because Steele was "special" or some other weird phenomena, considering the female variant has "faux eggs".
If it's a bug I could submit it in that forum, but I have no idea if this was intentional or some other reason.
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That's not how seahorses work... Nyrea are actually inspired on a species of recently discovered bugs whose males meet quite a gruesome end if i'm not mistaken.
I jumped to Nyrea there and didn't specify, which is my bad (my brain has an unfortunately habit to jump trains of thoughts halfway if I'm not all in and careful). The seahorse females actually just lay their eggs in the males which then pump their sperm around in the pouch. I was thinking more in the sense of "male pregnancies" via oviposition.
I hadn't heard about the insect though so I'll have to look that up since I haven't had much time to keep up with the latest species these past few years.
I'm interested in hearing about a species whose offspring are parasitoids to their own species rather than another.
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Wait, what's that? Is that the "Wrong" buzzer going off?
The male seahorse is equipped with a pouch on the ventral, or front-facing, side of the tail. When mating, the female seahorse deposits up to 1,500 eggs in the male's pouch. The male carries the eggs for 9 to 45 days until the seahorses emerge fully developed, but very small.
While it is true that many species of fish reproduce via external fertilisation (ie what you described):
- Sharks, like rays, have claspers (basically primitive penises) and are one of the first species that evolved internal fertilisation, iirc.
- And if we're talking invertebrates, barnacles have the biggest penises, relative to their sizes, because they are stationary animals and have to use their male reproductive organs to search for and fertilise nearby females. Internally.
Unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean, that'd be any animal species I guess ?
So... a species whose offspring takes part of its host's DNA and causes severe damage to the host?
Still sound like most animal species to me.
Heck, spider offsprings sometimes eat their mom as soon as they watch, and many a mother/father died of exhaustion by essentially starving itself to death to protect its unhatched brood (off the top of my head : octopuses, fish whose fathers take care of the eggs).
And there are many reasons so many women used to die when giving birth before the advent of modern medecine.
Plus humans are unfortunate enough to be one of the species whose embryos implant the deepest in the uterine walls... which means a whole lot of blood loss and pain when giving birth. As well as a whole lot of other unpleasant things that I refuse to go into here knowing there are pregophiles watching. And the size and shape of a baby's head relative to a human pelvis doesn't help.
Giving birth takes a lot of stamina (meaning if you starved yourself like a fproper lady in the Victorian era and wore waist-thinning corsets, statistically, you were gonna die 90% of the time), and it HURTS.
And you keep bleeding down there for up to 2 weeks afterwards.
It's called labor for a reason.
Giving birth takes a lot of stamina (meaning if you starved yourself like a fproper lady in the Victorian era and wore waist-thinning corsets, statistically, you were gonna die 90% of the time), and it HURTS.
And you keep bleeding down there for up to 2 weeks afterwards.
It's called labor for a reason.
Survival of the species is hardcore.
(Thank god TiTS is by no means a realistic game /ultramodern scifi medecine eradicated labor pains and pregnancy-related horrors in the TiTS verse)
....no species which implant their young into a host for incubation after which they emerge killing the host. The most commonly seen examples are several species of wasps.
Oh okay. I got confused because xenomorphs use their host's DNA to adapt to their environment.
Irl Terran parasitoids don’t assimilate DNA from the hosts. Nothing that complicated. They literally just....eat the host alive, killing them.
If you want examples, think wasps that lay their eggs on the backs of caterpillars. As soon as the eggs hatch, the larvae burrow into the poor caterpillar and slowly eat it alive, ultimately killing it.
Parasitoid flies are even worse because the maggots just take up the space in the caterpillar as they eat till it pops (which let me tell you, is disgusting and awful and I am a pretty hardened graduated biology major).
You wanna really test your gut though? Look up videos of the emerald jewel wasp. Gorgeous species with a gruesome fate in store for cockroaches they catch. They catch a roach, turn it into a zombie with their venom, put it in a burrow with at least one egg, trap it in there where the young will burrow into the roach’s abdomen and slowly eat it’s organs over a period of 8 days before emerging.
Also, the examples you listed aren’t parasitism so much as predation/scavenging.
I should also mention there’s a difference between parasitoids and parasites. Parasites don’t try to kill their hosts as endgame; they try to keep them alive as long as possible and usually death simply happens as a result of deteriorating health one way or another.
Parasitoids literally intend to kill the hosts eventually. And usually it’s pretty gruesome as detailed above.
Embryos are closer to parasites in that sense, though since ultimately it benefits the species (and the parents depending who you ask) it’s not considered a form of parasitism.
I know. I thought they were talking about an in-game species (because the xenomorph comparison confused me).
No, thank you. Been there, done that, can never unknow some things.
And I used to watch Hannibal episodes during my lunch breaks.
Ooh, okay that makes more sense. Didn't know there's a difference between a parasite and a parasitoid.
Though the species may benefit, the pregnant person's body very much doesn't.
Plus I like the inside joke that viviparous embryos are sort of parasites, I was having a bit of harmless fun at princezilla's expense (sorry).
Believe it or not, I used to study the immune system in college, and that includes what happens during a pregnancy, immunity-wise. It's actually pretty interesting, because since an embryo only possesses half of its host's markers, the host's immune system will try to destroy it because of the "wrong half" of its DNA, but the other half of the embryo's DNA (the one that's the same as the host's) tells the host's immune system to chill.
(Which is partly why many pregnant people experience morning sickness - the immune system is essentially mimicking a transplant rejection).
It's like, we evolved parasitic embryos before we got completely got rid of the immune system's reflex to destroy them, and somehow managed to circumvent that reflex by making a mess of our bodies' chemistry during pregnancy. That shit's hilarious to me.
I'm not saying it's not worth it - just that reproduction is freaking hardcore and takes a toll on the body.