The Creepy Sex-Death of the Male Anglerfish

The term 'anglerfish' can be applied to over 300 different kinds of animal, spanning almost twenty species, named for their method of hunting prey with a fleshy lure dangling off its head which can be wriggled in such a way that prey believe it is food. This development of the anglerfish is an ingenious twist of nature; it is not only practical, but has made it somewhat famous in the animal kingdom, not only for its scarily accurate portrayal in Finding Nemo.

The first thing you notice about the anglerfish is that it is fuck ugly. In every species. It is hideous. It has protruding teeth and bulging eyes and some species are covered in spiny hairs and others look like they are already decaying so that they fit in with the scum on the ocean floor. Most of them live at the bottom of the sea where it is so dark that everything is ugly, but the ones that glow have no excuse. The bioluminescence has evolved to attract prey, but it would seem only sensible to avoid something with a face like this...

And that's the female.

Actually, all of the big, scary ones are female. The males are rather more puny and not half as repulsive. They aren't as worried about feeding, so they don't have to be as predatory as the females. They don't need the big teeth, distending jaw, expanding stomach or light-proof gut lining (so they don't get caught having eaten something luminescent). They are a hell of a lot smaller than the females and their eyes and teeth aren't half as daunting. The male Photocorynus spiniceps is only a quarter of an inch long, one of the smallest vertebrate in the animal kingdom; it is near enough half a million times smaller than its female counterpart.

Some of them are even quite cute.

Sort of.

All that matters with the males is their testicles and their primary concern is mating.

They have very sensitive eyes to seek out their mates in the gloom of the ocean. They also have an amazing sense of smell with which they can sniff out the pheromones of females through the water. Once they have sought out a mate, they latch onto her with their sharp little teeth. He bites into her skin and releases an enzyme that digests the skin of his mouth and her side so that they fuse together. Over the next couple of weeks, his whole body is absorbed into her until all that remains of him is a pair of testicles attached to her side.

In response to the to hormones in the female's bloodstream, the testicles release sperm into her system so that she has an available mate whenever she is ready to breed. Many males can latch onto any given female. A female was once discovered with eight pairs of testicles hanging off her.

In most species, if the male does not find a female with which to mate, he dies. In some species, however, the males are able to swim away into a dark and private part of the ocean where they grow massively and turn into a female in place of their missing mate.

It really puts it into perspective how great it is to be a creature that doesn't die just because it can't get laid...

The Most Amazing Person You've Never Heard Of: Norman Borlaug

79 years and 3 days before I was born, a brilliant man was born in America. In his lifetime, he won many awards for his achievements and saved so many lives that people lost count long ago. Yet, very few people know his name or why it is important.

Norman Ernest Borlaug received in PhD in plant pathology and genetics in 1942 and then moved to Mexico, where he researched wheat. The research he conducted in the team of plant pathologist George Harrar led him to develop various genetically engineered strains of wheat which was high-yield and disease resistant. His work there spanned sixteen years, during which time he bred many successful crops. Altogether his work meant that a lot more wheat could be harvested from any given crop and his work in Mexico alone saved at least a million people from starvation.

After that, his career took him through numerous starving communities including places in India, China and various countries in Africa. In each one, he studied and improved the crops so that more could be gathered and more people fed. In the mid-1960s, he started to spread his powerful crops in war-torn India, which saved millions more from acute famine. He took his crops to Pakistan where wheat yields nearly double and, in the space of three years, the country became self-sufficient and no longer depended on foreign aid in order to stave off starvation.

In 1970, Borlaug was presented with the Nobel Peace Prize for his contribution to the world food supply. At that time, it was estimated that he had already saved over a billion lives.

When he retired from travelling through starving countries, he continued to teach and research to continue his legacy. His died of lymphoma at the age of 95 in December 2009. His achievements saved the lives of more people than you will ever know. He dedicated his life to easing the suffering of others and ending hunger in the world and no one can say that he did not achieve just that many times over. Throughout the course of his life, he was honoured with numerous awards and prizes for his work in helping others – and rightly so.

The sad thing is that so many people will never hear his name. He is no celebrity and he is not taught in schools, except to speciality students focussing on plant genetics. The amount of people he has saved from starvation increases every day as more and more people in developing countries survive on the crop strains that he developed and introduced to their ecosystems.

But the worst thing about people not knowing about Norman Borlaug and his amazing work is that it breeds so much ignorance among people who think they know about genetically engineered food. People campaigning against GM crops claim that it is harmful to people and that it will mutate them, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. The fact is that people make ignorant comments about it and stupid people listen; then stupid people get into power and they take the crops away from all the people who are benefiting from them. That wouldn’t be a problem if this wasn’t something that was necessary to save lives. People are already starving even with GM crops – without them, the world would not be able to feed two thirds of its population.

It’s only thanks to people like Norman Borlaug that mankind is becoming truly self-sufficient. Maybe people should stop complaining and thank him.

The Disgusting Truth About Butterflies

Along with ponies and rainbows and princesses, there are usually millions of brightly-coloured butterflies swarming around the flowery fairytale garden of every cliché female child. But maybe they shouldn’t be a part of this sickeningly girly idyll because they are actually quite gross. More specifically, it is their eating habits that can be repulsive.

People are taught – and generally this is true – that butterflies suck nectar from flowers for nourishment and drink from puddles through a long proboscis for water. Butterflies do this, but flowers are not their only source of food. Equally as commonly as they eat nectar, butterflies also feet on rotting fruit, animal dung and decaying corpses. Look at them, all there in that picture, all eating that poo.

Flowers alone do not provide enough sodium for butterflies, so they are attracting to salty things. If a butterfly has ever landed on you, it is not because it likes you or because you look particularly like a flower; actually, it is because the butterfly was attracted by the smell of salt in your sweat and blood and it want to eat you. Maybe it did eat you, but its proboscis was so tiny that you didn’t feel it sucking at you.

When they feed off anything that has been discarded and is now rotting – including fruit, but more often poo and the flesh of dead animals and people – they do something called ‘mud-puddling’. This is generally a male behaviour, but not exclusively, and the nutrients collected from it are sometimes offered to females as a gift preceding mating, so those slags are hardly less disgusting. From mud-puddling, the butterflies take salts, sugars and proteins.

Some species of butterfly are particularly attracted to human urine for its sodium content. Others prefer dun or carrion (dead stuff) for the ammonium ions found the. Fruits provide sugars as well as alcohol when they are in a sufficient state of decay.

Although they are less popular, moths have similar feeding patterns. Some species are even known for their habits of sucking blood from sleeping animals and humans and others are sadistic enough to feed off tears.

So … do you still think they’re sweet?