The Death of Romance: Sex and the Angler Fish

“I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas,” proclaims the voice of thought in T.S. Eliot’s poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

Throughout the poem, J. Alfred Prufrock expresses intense feelings of inadequacy and sexual frustration.  Notably, the writer of the poem, T.S. Eliot, remained a virgin until the age of twenty-six, at which time he married into his first rather hopeless marriage.

The poem is thought to be somewhat autobiographical.

Sadly, something far more dismal than either Mr. J. Alfred Prufrock or a crab scuttling backward across the sea floor exists in the ocean.  At the bottom—at the very nadir—of all things mannish, we find the male angler fish.

Before I tell you about the male angler fish, I must tell you what a woman once told me as we sat at a party I attended.  I don’t readily recall the details of the party, but I recall that the woman was a freshly, if not bitterly, divorced mother of three small children.  As I sat talking with this woman, she informed me that she was happy to have her three little darlings, but of her husband she said: “he was nothing more than a sperm donor.”

Fact is, the male angler fish is, literally, an onboard sperm donor.

You may recognize the female anglerfish for the widget—something akin to a fishing rod with a lure—they wave about their huge mouth to attract simple-minded prey.  Female angler fish are also full-blown celebrations in ugliness (see the photograph posted with this blog).  Finally, the female is a behemoth relative to her feeble male counterpart.

The mating ritual for angler fish is startlingly simple.  The tiny male (endowed with the largest nostrils in proportion to the head of any other species on the planet) smells and finds a female.  Once the male finds a suitable female, he swims up and bites her, usually on the belly, and refuses to release.

At the very moment the male angler bites into the female, life as a fish effectively ends for the male.  In a literal sense, the male angler fish becomes an appendage on the female angler fish.  The flesh of the male rapidly fuses with that of the female.  His muscles atrophy.  He becomes a sexual parasite, acquiring all sustenance from his female host.  The male fish becomes little more than a permanently attached sperm packet—ready to dispense whenever required.

And for all the women who see hopeful possibilities in this: no.  Elizabeth Taylor tried this at least twice in her life.

--Mitchell Hegman

Thanks to Kip Sullivan for sending me a video that inspired this blog!   (Photo:mynatureplace.org)