A "satanic" species of fish found deep in the depths of the ocean "has sex like a vampire".
This is according to fish experts who say some species of anglerfish, which look like "satanic potatoes", will bite a potential mate – just like a vampire – so the female releases an egg which can then be fertilised.
The sex lives of anglerfish, which have long prongs sprouting from their foreheads with a glowing tip to lure prey, were laid bare in 1925 by an ichthyologist at the Natural History Museum.
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Charles Tate Regan found that as well as vampire bites, some species of anglerfish would "permanently fuse" themselves onto the female during mating – never to detach.
And while people presumed these were juveniles stuck to their mothers, it was discovered they were actually small male anglerfish.
“He will connect to her blood supply and feed off the nutrients in her blood like a little vampire,” said James Maclaine, senior curator of fish at London’s Natural History Museum.
"I sometimes describe anglerfish as looking like a satanic potato."
He added female anglerfish can hold several males and that they can clamp themselves anywhere on the female.
“The record that I’m aware of is eight,” he said, adding sometimes scientists find males fused to a female of a different species. “I don’t know whether that’s just desperation or misidentification."
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In order to host their vampire mates, females are said to sometimes completely abandon their immune system and accept the males as part of their own body.
Maclaine said: “They still have some kind of immune system, but as to how that works, nobody knows."
And now Maclaine thinks a new species of anglerfish may have been discovered – which has an elaborate lure like a bouquet of flowers.
Found in a trawl net off Saint Helena in the mid-Atlantic in a Blue Belt programme exhibition, which studies the waters around the UK’s Overseas Territories, a black golf ball-sized youngster has been identified as a footballfish.
Maclaine said only six specimens of footballfish have so far been found, so his catch may be an existing or new species.
He said he will make drawings of the species' unique lure and send them to the world's leading anglerfish expert Ted Pietsch, at the University of Washington, to establish if he's made a new discovery.
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