19/06/2026
The deep sea Anglerfish has one of the strangest and most extreme reproductive strategies known in the animal kingdom, and it solves a brutal problem of life in the deep ocean. In the vast pitch black emptiness of the deep sea, finding a mate is extraordinarily difficult, since animals are scattered across enormous distances in total darkness. The Anglerfish evolved a permanent solution. The female is the large, iconic predator with the glowing lure that most people picture, while the male is tiny by comparison, sometimes less than a tenth of her size, and he is born with one overwhelming purpose, to find a female before he starves. The male has no lure and barely functioning digestive system, but he has highly developed eyes and a powerful sense of smell to track the female's chemical signals through the darkness. When he finally finds her, he bites onto her body and never lets go. His mouth fuses to her skin, their blood vessels join together, and his body begins to dissolve, losing its eyes, fins, and most of its organs until he becomes little more than a permanent lump of tissue attached to her flank, a built-in supply of s***m that she can use to fertilize her eggs whenever she chooses. A single female may carry several of these fused males on her body at once, having effectively absorbed her mates into herself forever.
