Jack
Brenton
AshishLife of an Anglerfish
June 18th 2010 05:13
Image from http://theoatmeal.com/comics/angler
The humpback anglerfish as depicted below is a deep-sea anglerfish found in parts of all oceans at depths of up to 2,000 meters (6,600 feet). Its length is up to 3 centimetres (1 inch) for males and up to 20 centimetres (8 inches) for females.
Female Anglerfish
These anglerfish employ an unusual mating method. Because individuals are locally rare and encounters doubly so, finding a mate is problematic. When scientists first started capturing 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 highly reduced male anglerfish.
At birth, male anglerfish are already equipped with extremely well developed olfactory organs that detect scents in the water. The male anglerfish lives solely to find and mate with a female. They are significantly smaller than a female angler fish, and may have trouble finding food in the deep sea. Furthermore, the growth of the alimentary canals of some males become stunted, preventing them from feeding. These features necessitate his quickly finding a female anglerfish to prevent death. 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 slowly atrophies, first losing his digestive organs, then his brain, heart, and eyes, and ends as 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.
*This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article for Anglerfish.
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