How far would you go for love?
Some would go pretty far, I guess! But none of us would go as far as the male Anglerfish. Let me tell you about a love story like no other on the planet.
The anglerfish lives in the deep sea where it’s hard to find a meal. The female evolved in an interesting way to tackle this problem. On top of her head she has a modified dorsal ray, which looks like and acts as a fishing rod. On the tip of the rod there’s a luminescent organ which helps to attract pray. This organ in fact is made up of a colony of symbiotic bacteria. In the dark depths of the ocean, pray are attracted to this strange moving light and are lured into the giant mouth of the female. Fun fact: Because of her huge jaws and an elastic stomach, she can eat pray twice her own size!
The male anglerfish took a totally different approach to deal with the scarcity of food. They’ve simply evolved to go without food. They stay very small – the smaller you are, the less food you need. Very, very small in fact. In some species, the female can be up to 500.000 times heavier than her male partner. When in a species, there’s a difference in physiology between males and females, this is called sexual dimorphism. Once the male reaches adulthood, he stops eating altogether and starts putting all of his energy and time into finding a female partner. They have huge nostrils to sniff around and try and pick up the scent of a beautiful lady. Most of them don’t accomplish their mission and die without even knowing love, alone and starved to death. But, the ones that do find a female, do something extraordinary. First, they try not to annoy her, because you know, if your other half is thousands of times bigger than you are, you have to be careful. Then they start kissing – don’t ask me how – and soon he bites onto her, which releases a chemical that starts fusing their bodies together, joining them for life! The male’s eyes and fins start wasting away and he is nourished only by the bloodstream of the female. In fact, the male has become nothing but a reproductive organ that the female carries around and activates when she wants her eggs fertilised. The things a man would do for love…