Listening to my colleague talk about dissecting hearts (and not to forget the stench from a week old rotting one) and playing with acid soaked eggs makes me glad that some of the nature's weirdest secrets remains as one to me. But my daily dose of humour at Sherman's lagoon led me to do some search on exotic sea creatures just to find out how long does hermit crab live.
Part of the comic strip from Sherman's Lagoon
Darn, curiosity killed the cat, or in my case, gross me out!
Somehow, reading all those interesting biology facts about marine life made me hungry for more details on these underwater creatures. Thanks to the hyperlinks in the internet, somehow I ended up with the Anglerfish page.
That's where I stumble upon some of Mother Nature's hidden secrets
When scientists first started capturing ceratioid anglerfish, they noticed that all of the specimens were females. These individuals were a few inches in size and almost all of them had what appeared to be parasites attached to them. It turned out that these "parasites" were the remains of male ceratioids.Males? Parasites? Creepy... let's read on..
They (males) have no digestive system, and thus are unable to feed independently. They must find a female anglerfish, and quickly, or else they will die.Ouch! That hurt my male pride... But the female sure gets an everlasting 'bond' with her beloved male though.
... ... When he finds a female, he bites into her flank, and releases an enzyme which digests the skin of his mouth and her body, fusing the pair down to the blood vessel level. The male then atrophies into nothing more than a pair of gonads that release sperm in response to hormones in the female's bloodstream indicating egg release.
biology comics anglerfish
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