When the thin and small male angler finds the opposite sex-a girl who is 500,000 times heavier, he will never let go easily. No matter where the opposite sex appears, the male angler will bite it tightly, fuse his face into the other's body tissue, and release sperm on the other half of his life.
There are more than 160 species under the classification of deep-sea anglerfish. If you mistake the female and male of the deep-sea anglerfish as different animals, it would be excusable.
The females of anglerfish are radiant. Their most notable feature is that they have a luminous "bait" on the front of their head. This bait can help them attract prey and the opposite sex. Different types of anglerfish have different shapes of bait, and their luminous patterns are also different. Males wandering around can use this to find the same type of females. The female fish also has a big mouth with a blood basin, her mouth is full of huge sharp teeth, and her stomach is like a cave to ensure that they can eat and digest whatever prey they encounter in the lonely deep sea.
Different species of anglerfish also differ greatly in body shape. Some anglers are slender and streamlined, while others have a funny face like a spherical stomach. They look like a water polo in a swimming pool, and they will never have access to adjectives such as "agile" and "flexible" for a lifetime.
Sometimes, female anglerfish will have tiny bumps on their bodies that look like parasites that are begging for food. In fact, it is not wrong to say that they are parasites, these things are indeed "parasitic" in their own way-those are all male fish.
The male angler is too small, and some types of male fish are even one of the smallest vertebrates in the world ("vertebrates" are animals with vertebrae, and "invertebrates"-animals without vertebrae Corresponding). These lucky males have achieved their only goal in their lives: to find females that may be 500,000 times heavier than them.
In fact, male anglerfish cannot eat. From birth, their task is to find females in the endless darkness. However, only about 1% of male fish can succeed, and the rest are starved to death. However, because of the small head, the male anglerfish has the largest nostril in the animal kingdom and can smell the female’s traces, and then use the pliers-like teeth to hook firmly to the female fish.Integrate into one for life.
The principle of the "combination" of the angler's husband and wife is this: after the male fish is in place, the enzyme will begin to melt its face, letting it merge with the female. After contacting and fusing with the female fish's circulatory system, the male fish will draw nutrients from the female fish and continue to grow. At the same time, unnecessary organs and structures such as eyes will shrink. To be precise, male fish steal nutrients from female fish, and they are indeed female "parasites."
This way of life is called "heterosexual parasitism"-yes, anglerfish will parasitize the "self" (there are also several anglerfish males who are very lucky, they will not fuse. They are connected to each other, stealing nutrients and After releasing the sperm, the male will let go of the female and turn around to leave).
The secretion of hormones by the loving angler couple is also synchronized, that is to say, when the wife releases egg cells, it can also stimulate the husband to release sperm. The female fish’s egg belt is 30 feet long (about 9.1 meters, 1 foot ≈ 30.48 cm), and the egg cells in it absorb the sperm of the male fish (because the male fish also provides something to the female fish-such as sperm-some biological Scientists believe that the way anglers get along is not entirely parasitic. Their relationship is also very complicated).
As a result, the female anglerfish became a self-fertilized, hermaphrodite species. In her 30-year life, the female fish can combine with several male fishes, and all the male fish will produce sperm for her until the female fish dies. At this time, the entire "complex" will sink into the abyss.
This kind of countermeasure to solve the mating problem can be described as ingenious, but it also turns the angler into a fertility machine, and the husband and wife have to continuously produce eggs and sperm without exhausting the energy of the female fish. This is also the reason why the female angler is overwhelming the partner in body shape-everything is because of the gametes, that is, the egg cells and sperm.
Humans always think that burly males are superior to females, and they think that this applies everywhere, but the fact is that in nature, females of most species grow larger than males, part of the reason. It is the female that takes a huge amount of energy to produce egg cells. The girl's mouth and stomach are so massive, and because of the lack of food in their habitat, the female fish must ensure that they can eat all the food they encounter to obtain energy. In addition, egg cells take up more space than sperm,So it doesn't matter if males are relatively small.
In other corners of the animal kingdom, the gametes that females can produce during their lifetime are quantitative, so the egg cells are of great significance, and females must carefully select their mating partners. For example, the girls may only spend the spring evening with the best dancers or the strongest fighters to ensure that the person next to the pillow can pass on the best quality genes to the next generation. When mammals and other creatures are pregnant with offspring, mothers have to take in more energy to nourish the little ones in their stomachs.
Female picky makes males fight fiercely for the right to mate, which eventually leads to the evolution of "extraordinary" body shapes in certain organisms-in order to defeat opponents and win the hearts of females, males will eventually grow more burly than females.
Female broad-footed bagshrews and anglerfish are "selecting" the opposite sex that is most adaptable to the environment in their own unique ways. The former allows the partner to grow majestic testicles, while the latter's method also really makes the male "brained." Remember I said that only 1% of male fish can find a female before they die? Those little friends who died are not because they didn’t work hard enough—it’s really too difficult to locate a female fish deep in the vast, dim ocean. Only the best tracking masters have the opportunity to integrate with the female and integrate their own. The incense continues. Probably this is the reason why the nasal cavity of male fish is so developed over time. It is the large nostril that guarantees their right to spread genes.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the first biologists who observed anglerfish thought that the female fish was full of their larvae. However, this kind of fish lives in such a strange way, it is no wonder that scientists will draw wrong conclusions. However, when the truth came out, the initial confusion turned into shock, and then turned into fear. In 1938, the great naturalist and explorer William Beebe summarized the style of Angler as follows:
In such a vast and intimidating darkness, the scent drove his brain towards a behemoth. The opposite sex takes the initiative to bite a hole in its soft side, feeling the blood of the other party gradually filling the blood vessels, and abandon everything as a fish, commit to become a worm, abandon the mind, and abandon the feelings-this is pure heaven Night Tan, unless the evidence is right in front of us, we will never accept it.
Boy Angler, go on swimming, show them the evidence, and don’t lose your identity.
