Calamari Lovers Beware: Korean Woman "Painfully" Inseminated By a Cooked Squid
A 63-year-old Korean woman was inseminated by a cooked squid while she was eating it.
The woman had felt "experienced severe pain in her oral cavity immediately after eating a portion of parboiled squid along with its internal organs," according to a scientific paper published in the Journal of Parasitology.
The woman had immediately spat out the partially boiled squid in her mouth but still felt a "pricking and foreign-body sensation" everywhere in her mouth.
When she went to the hospital, doctors had to remove a dozen "small, white, spindle-shaped, bug-like organisms stuck in the mucous membrane of the tongue, cheek, and gingiva," which were later identified as the dead squid's spermatophores.
Apparently the cooked squid's spermatophores were still active and had inseminated the woman's oral cavity.
A spermatophore or sperm ampulla is a capsule, which contains spermatozoa, produced by males of various animal species and is transferred in its entirety to a female during copulation.
Each sperm capsule has an ejaculatory apparatus, capable of ejecting the sperm mass quite forcefully, and a cement body for attachment, according to Danna Staaf from Squid a Day.
"Of course, neither of those is a needle or a knife—the sort of thing you'd expect to need for actual implantation (into either a female squid or a human mouth)," Staaf wrote.
"As it turns out, no one is quite sure how spermatophores implant themselves into skin," she added.
She noted that while there have been previous reports of "sperm stings" from eating raw squid, she believes that the latest case study is the first that confirms spermatophore activity in a cooked squid.