This afternoon I was in the kitchen washing dishes while my daughter was watching Animal Planet.

She came in, as she often does, talking and waving her arms around, telling me all about the mating and reproduction methods of anglerfish. It went something like this:

“The female is ten times bigger than the male and when they mate, the male bites into the female and sucks blood from the female. Each day she absorbs more of him and eventually gets pregnant. Then after she has the babies he is just a lump and he stays there forever. And they stay that way for life. For life, Mom! Then he dies but he’s still there on her back for all eternity and she has to go get a new one.”

“Now, how would you like that, Mom?”

I am somewhat disturbed that my daughter seems to have some idea that reproduction is supposed to be enjoyable for the parties involved.

I just Googled anglerfish and found her account to be mostly true. From Wikipedia:

Some anglerfishes of the superfamily Ceratiidae employ an unusual mating method. Since individuals are presumably locally rare and encounters doubly so, finding a mate is problematic. 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.

At birth, male ceratioids are already equipped with extremely well developed olfactory organs that detect scents in the water. When it is mature, the male’s digestive system degenerates, making him incapable of feeding independently, which necessitates his quickly finding a female anglerfish or else dying. The sensitive olfactory organs help the male to detect the pheromones that signal the proximity of a female anglerfish. When he finds a female, he bites into her skin, and releases an enzyme that 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, which release sperm in response to hormones in the female’s bloodstream indicating egg release. This extreme sexual dimorphism ensures that, when the female is ready to spawn, she has a mate immediately available.