Considered a delicacy in some parts of the world, a partially cooked ‘hot and bothered’ squid injected its sperm bag into a Korean woman’s mouth…more specifically her tongue.
The unidentified 63-year-old woman reportedly experienced a “pricking and foreign-body sensation” while she chewed and spat the squid out. She had to go to the hospital when she felt severe pain and several “small, squirming” creepy crawlies in her mouth.
Yup, the dead squid’s spermatophores were still active, and they’d inseminated into the woman’s mouth.
Researchers think that the squid’s sperm bags came out while the woman chewed her food. Squids have “sperm bags,” which are ejaculatory apparatuses that attach themselves to a female’s body before slowly secreting sperm, according to Fairfax New Zealand News.
Danna Staaf from Squid a Day, who found this bizarre story, explains further:
Each spermatophore includes an ejaculatory apparatus, which can expel the sperm mass quite forcefully, and a cement body for attachment. Of course, neither of those is a needle or a knife—the sort of thing you’d expect to need for actual implantation (into either a female squid or a human mouth). I’ve written a bit about this mystery before. As it turns out, no one is quite sure how spermatophores implant themselves into skin.
But whatever the details, it’s happened to humans more than once. An earlier case study reports “sperm stings” from consumption of raw squid, but the recent Journal of Parasitology paper is the first report I’ve seen of spermatophore activity in a cooked squid (parboiled, to be specific). That’s . . . quite impressive, actually.
The restaurant missed a golden opportunity…”It’s a delicacy we usually charge extra for but we really like you so it’s on the house.”
[Cheers io9]
