Have you watched the weirdest naughty movies on the web? I guarantee that they are cute cartoons compared to the awesome/disguising/interesting weirdness that is the mating method of the angler fish, a perfect opener for the blog right?
You know the angler fish right? It looks like a cross between Starship Troopers and Cthulu. It is thoroughly scary, although I have to say I’m shit scared of tiny jellyfish as well, so I’m not a very good source for animal scariness ratings. In any case, the big ugly fish with the flashlight on its head is the female angler fish. Her hubby is much smaller, and actually much less capable, sort of an evolutionary dead end (feminists rejoice).In fact the only reason males live, is to find females and mate with them.
So when a male finds a female, it bites into her skin and releases an enzyme which digests the skin of his mouth, and the skin of the female. The two are fused together to the blood-vessel level, and then the male slowly dies away, losing his digestive organs, then his brain, heart, and eyes. All that is left is a pair of gonads, basically a pair of balls, which releases sperm when needed.How nice.
This whole process is put extremely well by The Oatmeal (funny comic ensues), where I learned of this phenomenon, and if you are so inclined, you can read the wiki article about angler fish reproduction as well.