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It's February 2008. The location; a hospital emergency department within the city of Seoul, in South Korea.
A 63-year-old woman has arrived complaining of sharp pains in her mouth and clutching a chunk of squid from her seafood dinner. The physicians examining her find what appear to be a number of tiny writhing animals stuck to her tongue, cheeks and gums. Assuming the creatures are some form of squid parasite, the medics quickly remove them.
But a closer look shows that these are no parasites: they are in fact spermatophores - tiny guided missiles containing a payload of squid sperm.
Male squid release spermatophores during mating. They then lodge themselves in the female squid’s skin near her genital opening, and release their sperm as the female lays her eggs. “Besides being a sperm package, the squid spermatophore is also an implantation device,” says José Eduardo Marian, a squid researcher at the University of São Paulo in Brazil.
Accidents will happen, though: when the Korean woman chewed on the dead male squid’s flesh she triggered the release of his spermatophores. The sperm sacs mistook the woman’s soft mouth for a female squid and implanted themselves there instead. The dead male squid had, effectively, attempted to inseminate a human female.
Squid don’t as a rule attempt to inseminate humans - although with at least 16 such cases on the medical books the behaviour is more common than one might think.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc.com/earth/bespoke/story/20140908-twisted-world-of-sexual-organs/index.html
A 63-year-old woman has arrived complaining of sharp pains in her mouth and clutching a chunk of squid from her seafood dinner. The physicians examining her find what appear to be a number of tiny writhing animals stuck to her tongue, cheeks and gums. Assuming the creatures are some form of squid parasite, the medics quickly remove them.
But a closer look shows that these are no parasites: they are in fact spermatophores - tiny guided missiles containing a payload of squid sperm.
Male squid release spermatophores during mating. They then lodge themselves in the female squid’s skin near her genital opening, and release their sperm as the female lays her eggs. “Besides being a sperm package, the squid spermatophore is also an implantation device,” says José Eduardo Marian, a squid researcher at the University of São Paulo in Brazil.
Accidents will happen, though: when the Korean woman chewed on the dead male squid’s flesh she triggered the release of his spermatophores. The sperm sacs mistook the woman’s soft mouth for a female squid and implanted themselves there instead. The dead male squid had, effectively, attempted to inseminate a human female.
Squid don’t as a rule attempt to inseminate humans - although with at least 16 such cases on the medical books the behaviour is more common than one might think.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc.com/earth/bespoke/story/20140908-twisted-world-of-sexual-organs/index.html
