Woman accidentally gets inseminated in the mouth after eating boiled squid

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Woman accidentally gets inseminated in the mouth after eating boiled squid

Inseminated in the mouth? Apparently. While eating boiled squid, a 63 year old Korean woman suddenly started having a bunch of tiny pricking pains inside her mouth. She spit out her mouthful of squid, but the pain continued. When she then went to the hospital, a doctor discovered that the pain was caused by barb-tipped squid semen burrowing into her cheeks and gums.

There, doctors removed what a Journal of Parasitology paper later described as 12 “small, white spindle-shaped, bug-like organisms stuck in the mucous membrane of the tongue, cheek, and gingiva”—the dead squid’s live spermatophores which had inseminated the woman’s mouth.

What is a spermatophore? you ask, after cleaning the vomit from your keyboard. Squid a Day, a fascinating cephalopod blog on Science 20 by biologist Danna Staaf, reports it’s nothing like a bug actually—no legs, no eyes. Rather, it’s “like a cup of semen–nothing more than an aggregation of gametes.” So, yeah—12 little cups of squid semen implanted themselves in the woman’s mouth. Yummy.

And there’s more:

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.

So she bit down on the squid, released the squid sperm things, with their barbed tips, the spermatophone reached the soft pink walls inside her mouth and were like “This looks like the place” and burrowed in.