The spotted ratfish is a deep-sea freak. It’s got rabbit eyes, a venomous spine, and a fully weaponized sex forehead. Not many creatures can claim to have a forehead built for f**king.
Male ratfish, also known as ghost sharks or chimaeras, come equipped with a bizarre mating tool called the tenaculum. It’s a fleshy, club-shaped appendage that extends from their forehead.
They’ve got a f**ked up disgusting unicorn thing going on. Because it’s not a glittery horn that shoots rainbows, it’s a freaky little knob covered in rows of sharklike teeth.
This weird little appendage has a practical application: sex. The tenaculum pops out of a hidden forehead pocket when it’s time to get busy, latching onto a female’s pectoral fin so she doesn’t float off mid-coitus.
If you’ve ever wondered how astronauts on deep space missions are going to have sex, the male ratfish might give you a bit of a clue. However, I imagine (and desperately hope) that NASA’s solution leans more toward a series of straps rather than a series of spikes on a stick.
This Deep-Sea Fish Has 8 Rows of Forehead Teeth—and Uses Them for Sex
The ratfish’s abundance of disturbingly placed teeth is visually fascinating. It also provides the first objective evidence of fully formed teeth sprouting outside of the vertebrate’s mouth. It’s like discovering that your nose is full of teeth.
I’m so sorry for conjuring that image in your head.
Biologists Gareth Fraser and Karly Cohen from the University of Florida led a team that scanned, dissected, and genetically profiled dozens of spotted ratfish. They found that the tenaculum develops from a pimple-like nub in juvenile males and eventually forms a forehead clamp lined with seven or eight rows of retractable teeth.
Females also start to grow one, but theirs never fully develops. That little finding that suggests both sexes might’ve once used this head-club, might’ve even been used as a defense weapon before it was fully converted into a toothy sex latch. Even nature is disarming and opting for love instead of war, man.
They also dug through fossils dating back 315 million years. They found prehistoric chimaeras with similar headgear, meaning this nightmarish sex appendage isn’t new. It has likely undergone several evolutionary revisions and may undergo several more in the eons to come.
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