Well, this is an interesting find, while doing some research on line about anglerfish, the fish on the image to the left, I came across the article on Wikipedia where they talked about their reproduction cycle. Because of how rare the Angler fish is and at the depths that these fish are found, the chances of them ever find a mate would be very low. That’s why some anglerfishes, like those of the Ceratioid group (Ceratiidae, or sea devils), employ an unusual mating method.
When scientists first started capturing ceratioid anglerfish, they noticed that all of the specimens were female. These individuals were a few centimetres in size and almost all of them had what appeared to be parasites attached to them. It turned out that these “parasites” were highly reduced male ceratioids.
At birth, male ceratioids are already equipped with extremely well-developed olfactory organs that detect scents in the water. The male ceratioid lives solely to find and mate with a female. They are significantly smaller than a female angler fish, and may have trouble finding food in the deep sea. Furthermore, the growth of the alimentary canals of some males becomes stunted, preventing them from feeding. These features necessitate his quickly finding a female anglerfish to prevent death.
The sensitive olfactory organs help the male to detect the pheromones that signal the proximity of a female anglerfish. When he finds a female, he bites into her skin, and releases an enzyme that digests the skin of his mouth and her body, fusing the pair down to the blood-vessel level. The male then slowly atrophies, first losing his digestive organs, then his brain, heart, and eyes, and ends as nothing more than a pair of gonads, which release sperm in response to hormones in the female’s bloodstream indicating egg release. This extreme sexual dimorphism ensures that, when the female is ready to spawn, she has a mate immediately available. Multiple males can be incorporated into a single female . [Wikipedia]
