Parboiled Calamari Inseminates Korean Woman's Mouth

Squid tries to impregnate Korean woman. It's a sentence that seems like the most impossible of cross-species interactions, but a paper published by the Journal of Parasitology, is saying a South Korean woman was inseminated, if you will, with squid sperm cells after eating parboiled calamari.

According to the Huffington Post, the squid was cooked with all of its internal organs intact. From there, the 63-year-old woman took a bite and noticed a "prickling and foreign body sensation." At this point, the journal abstract states, she spat out the portion she had eaten but the pain continued.

Seeing a physician, it was found she had 12 "small, white spindle-shaped, bug-like organisms stuck in the mucous membrane of the tongue, cheek, and gingiva." These were identified as squid spermatophores and were completely removed.

To get a sense of how squid spermatophores can function automatically, even without the organism alive or even present in some cases if the sex organ has been removed, take a look at this YouTube video showing the spermatophores of a jumbo squid "exploding":

According to an edition of the Biological Bulletin of the Marine Biological Library, squid spermatophores "have an autonomous mechanism that enables them to migrate into body tissue" as they often implant themselves into the unmodified tissue -- tissue that isn't necessarily an egg -- of a female. The paper says the sperm have an "ejaculatory apparatus for releasing the sperm mass and a cement body presumably for attaching the sperm mass to the female."

In the case of this Korean woman, both the evidence of the ejaculatory apparatus and the cement body were seen in action.

Note: You can't get inseminated by the more the traditional calamari you may be used to eating as all internal organs of that seafood have been removed.

(H/T Daily Mail)