In the unlit depths of the ocean, where food is scarce, and chance encounters are rarer still, anglerfish have evolved one of nature’s most bizarre mating approaches. When a male anglerfish finds a partner, he doesn’t just court her — he attaches to her body, sometimes fusing with her for life.
This extreme adaptation, known as sexual parasitism, helps ensure reproductive success in a world where mates are few and far between. And recent research published in Current Biology has taken another step toward unraveling the secrets behind this strange mating strategy. It turns out that the evolutionary innovations that allow anglerfish to thrive in the deep ocean go beyond their peculiar courtship habits.
“We found that a cascade of traits, including those required for sexual parasitism, allowed anglerfishes to invade the deep sea during a period of extreme global warming when the planet’s oceans were in ecological upheaval,” Chase Brownstein, lead author of the study and a graduate student at Yale, said in a Yale news release.
