Bitch: On the Female of the Species

by Lucy Cooke

The deep-sea angler fish Ceratias holboelli has taken this to an extreme. Males may be more than sixty times shorter and half a million times lighter – essentially little more than swimming sacs of sperm. Once the male has sniffed out a female from her leaking pheromones in the pitch-black depths, he will latch on to her with his mouth, physically fusing with her body for the rest of his life – the evolutionary embodiment of a clingy sexual freeloader. The female is thereafter in control of the male’s entire existence, including when he ejaculates his sperm. The Danish fisherman who discovered this intimate set-up in 1925 declared that ‘so perfect and complete is the union of husband and wife that one may almost be sure that their genital glands ripen simultaneously’. And they say romance is dead.