Module 10

 Pipefish

    Something evolving like this is very interesting. In most species that have a courting ritual, the male is the elaborate sex that has things like big pretty feathers or something like that to use in courting. However, in pipefish, it is the female. One hypothesis that might explain this weird change is the fact that male pipefish are the ones that carry the eggs and children. Perhaps in species where it is the male that takes care of the offspring, this is the case. Off the top of my head, I know that seahorses also have the male carry the young, so it would be interesting to do research and see if the female is the one courting the male in that species as well. As far as how something like this would evolve in the wild, that's a hard question to answer. Maybe the females had a trait that allowed them to be more successful fighting off predators or other things like that that males would typically do in other species, so they took on a lot of the traditional male roles for species and left the males to take care of the offspring. In the video, it looked like the female used her big fin thing to court the male, so maybe that was used somehow in a different way originally and had evolved over time to be the main thing for courting males when the roles were switched. Females might also grow larger than males, making them more useful to fight off predators and protect the males and their babies. An interesting experiment would be to see which females the males choose if given a narrow selection of two females, to see what traits the males are looking for when being courted. an experiment like that would help us gain some insight on why this courting ritual started, and how they use it.