These Devoted Dads Across the Animal Kingdom Will Warm Your Heart This Father’s Day

From foxes that bring home dinner to fish that keep watch over their young, male animals across several species take an active role in building nests and caring for their babies

Jess Daninhirsch | Museums Reporting Intern

June 18, 2026 4:53 p.m.

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Father’s Day is meant to acknowledge all the dads out there. For Smithsonian experts, that includes the furry, feathered, scaly and spiky ones. Karen McDonald, STEM program coordinator at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, along with curators from the National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute, helped put together a list of nine animal fathers that display some intriguing traits and behaviors.

“There’s different strategies in the animal world,” McDonald says. “In some cases, it’s like ‘I’m going to have one young and I’m going to invest a lot, a lot, a lot of energy,’ versus ‘I’m going to have a whole bunch of young, not invest a ton and hope that one or two survive.”

Naturally, different species have varying levels of parental involvement. Some animals co-parent their young with their mates, especially birds, McDonald adds. While it’s common for amphibian fathers to be involved in raising their offspring, this type of care is less common among mammal and reptile dads. And fish have a much wider variety of familial relationships, she notes.

From fish to birds to mammals, Smithsonian magazine recognizes some of the more fascinating fathers in the animal kingdom.

Seahorse

Male seahorses are the ones to carry and birth the offspring. “The female transfers those unfertilized eggs into his pouch, and then he fertilizes them inside,” says McDonald. “He literally becomes pregnant.”

Seahorses can birth up to 2,000 babies at once, but very few of them will survive to adulthood.

Though male pregnancy is extremely rare for animals, seahorses aren’t alone: Male pipefish do it, too. “Here in the Chesapeake Bay, where we are, there’s a species that’s closely related to seahorses, called pipefish, and if you were to take a seahorse and stretch it into a long, thin noodle, that’s what a pipefish looks like,” McDonald says.

Giant water bug

Some male giant water bugs end up wearing eggs like a backpack. The female will “glue” the eggs onto her mate’s back, and then he tends to them.

“It’s kind of fun to think of an egg backpack,” McDonald says. “He’ll occasionally come up to the surface so that the eggs can absorb oxygen. … He’ll do little underwater push-ups so that the water’s moving up and down to circulate around the eggs.”

The males do this to ensure a good hatch rate for the eggs. The giant water bug, which has a lifespan of around a year, will carry the eggs for about one to two weeks. When a male water bug takes care of the eggs on his back, McDonald notes, “he becomes more vulnerable, too, because he’s heavier. He can’t fly; he can’t go anywhere if he’s watching the eggs.”

Arapaima

Arapaima are some of the largest freshwater fish in the world, so they don’t have many natural predators to worry about as adults. However, arapaima parents must protect their very tiny young from piranhas, caimans and other animals.

“Their young are quite susceptible to predation because of their small size,” says Rebecca Sturniolo, curator for Amazonia and American Trail at the National Zoo, in an email. “They don’t become visible to the naked eye until about a week old.”

An arapaima father is known to protect his young by scooping them up in his large mouth, swimming away from the potential threat, and releasing them when they reach safety.

Common loon

It’s unusual for male birds to pick the nest site, but that’s the job of a common loon father-to-be.

“They initiate and lead that selection, and I think a lot of it has to do with predators,” McDonald says. “Part of that strategy is having enough room for them to swim to approach the nest and to defend the nest.”

Both male and female loons take care of their young, and the parents stay with the loonlets until they are grown. The birds are known for their drawn-out, mournful “wail,” which they use to signal their location to mates as night begins to fall.

Osprey

Similarly to the common loon, the male ospreys are the ones to choose the nest site. It’s a long-term commitment for them, because they tend to return to the same site year after year, says McDonald.

“It’s really fun because the males will come back first, they’ll work on the nest, and then the females will come, and then he does this little fun courtship display,” she says.

The female osprey does much of the egg incubating, but the male will give her breaks. They’re “super involved dads,” she adds, and “they co-care for the young.” As the offspring grow up, they enter what McDonald calls “flight school”: “The males and females will call to them, and then they’ll flappy flap and go up in the air, and they’ll encourage them.”

Unlike loons, the osprey adults will migrate before the chicks are fully grown. However, the female will typically leave first, while the male continues parental care. As McDonald puts it, they go on “separate vacations.”

Red fox

While mother red foxes care for their babies in the den, fathers will hunt around the clock to feed them. The males will eat small amounts of food when they need to, but most of their prey goes to the family.

“They eat a whole bunch of stuff, ranging from insects and berries and birds and mammals, whatever's around,” McDonald says. “They can also cache their food, so they can bury food around the area and leave it for later.”

The father foxes are also great teachers, she notes; they will show their young how to hunt by bringing back live prey, helping them to prepare for their future.

“He really is feeding her and feeding them full time until they’re about four weeks old,” McDonald says. “After that, then the female will start making longer and longer trips away from the den, because they need so much more food and nutrition, both for her and for the pups.”

Foxes change den locations often—every few weeks, according to McDonald—because they don’t want to leave their scent lingering long enough to attract predators.

Greater rhea

Male greater rheas are stay-at-home single fathers.

They “will court multiple females at a time, and once breeding occurs, the males build nests,” Sara Hallager, curator of birds at the National Zoo, says in an email. “Each female lays her eggs in the nest, but after that, mom rheas have no role in raising the chicks.”

The males will incubate and rear the chicks. While taking care of their young, these flightless birds will charge at potential threats, including humans and sometimes even females of their own species.

Golden lion tamarin

For the first few weeks of their lives, baby golden lion tamarins will cling to their mothers to nurse, but after that, they will cling to their fathers.

“Carrying them is a huge job, and they’re only not carrying them when mom is nursing them,” Kenton Kerns, curator of small mammals at the National Zoo, says in an email. “Carrying also means they’re protecting them from predators and showing them through experience what to eat, how to traverse the forest, where to sleep, etc.”

These arboreal monkeys “learn from all the members of the family, but if there’s no father to carry the babies, the mom will not be able to care for them herself, and they will likely pass away,” Kerns adds.

The children tend to hang out with their fathers more as they start to wean from their mothers.

Three-spined stickleback

These small fish, found in both freshwater and saltwater environments, have intricate rituals for mating and caring for their young. To attract a mate, a male stickleback will build a nest out of spiggin—a sticky secretion from his kidneys—as well as debris and algae. The tunnel-like den must be strong enough to support eggs, but flexible enough to allow water and oxygen to flow through it.

When the male three-spined stickleback is ready to breed, his stomach turns orange, then he performs a zigzag dance for the female and leads her to the den. The female will deposit the eggs in the den and then leave.

The male fertilizes the eggs and takes over their care. He will fan the eggs to oxygenate them, as well as clean them and protect them from predators. When the eggs hatch, the father continues to care for the young inside the den, and he will retrieve hatchlings in his mouth if they wander too far away from safety.

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