Totally wild bio fact of the day: anglerfish sex

The male anglerfish loses its digestive system as an adult. So, to stay alive, it seeks out a female and latches on with its teeth. It then secretes an enzyme that dissolves the flesh of its own mouth and the female’s body, fusing itself to the female permanently.

The male then, like some sort of sick Cheshire Cat, disappears, leaving only a pair of gonads. When the female releases eggs, they release sperm.

I love this from Wikipedia:

When scientists first started capturing ceratioid anglerfish, they noticed that all of the specimens were females. These individuals were a few inches in size and almost all of them had what appeared to be parasites attached to them. It turned out that these “parasites” were the remains of male ceratioids.

Analogies are at your own peril.