• Question: how can fish a sexuall intercourse.

    Asked by to Claire, Ian, Sergey, Vicky, Zena on 24 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Sergey Lamzin

      Sergey Lamzin answered on 24 Jun 2014:

      If your question was ‘how do fish have sex?’ then most of them don’t.

      The female lays down unfertilised eggs and the male spreads it’s sperm over the eggs.
      Some species though do have sex in the way that the male kind of swims upside down and then fertilises the eggs inside the female.

    • Photo: Claire Shooter

      Claire Shooter answered on 25 Jun 2014:

      As Sergey said, most fish just squirt eggs and sperm out into the same bit of sea and hope for the best! sometimes the amount of sperm that gets released can actually change the colour of the water…check out this picture of the ‘pink tide’ produced by coral spawn (I know coral isn’t a fish, but it’s still impressive)

    • Photo: Ian Simpson

      Ian Simpson answered on 25 Jun 2014:

      Sergey and Claire have this covered already.

      But there is at least one (and therefore probably more) species of fish that has survived by reproducing asexually (essentially cloning itself) for over 100,000 years. The Amazonian Molly fish. This came as a big surprise as Vertebrates were not though to be able to do this without accumulating a large amount of genetic damage. Rather amusingly the sperm is still needed, but only to trick the egg into developing, it doesn’t contribute any genetic material.

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