2012.06.15
A 63-year-old Korean woman who dined on parboiled squid ended up biting off more than she could chew.

According to a scientific paper from the Journal of Parasitology, the woman "experienced severe pain in her oral cavity immediately after eating a portion of parboiled squid along with its internal organs." Despite spitting the food out, she still felt a "pricking and foreign-body sensation" in her oral cavity.
When she went to the hospital, they removed a dozen "small, white spindle-shaped, bug-like organisms stuck in the mucous membrane of the tongue, cheek, and gingiva." Turns out the dead squid's spermatophores were still active despite the creature being dead. Squid a Day has more on this bizarre story:
According to a scientific paper from the Journal of Parasitology, the woman "experienced severe pain in her oral cavity immediately after eating a portion of parboiled squid along with its internal organs." Despite spitting the food out, she still felt a "pricking and foreign-body sensation" in her oral cavity.
When she went to the hospital, they removed a dozen "small, white spindle-shaped, bug-like organisms stuck in the mucous membrane of the tongue, cheek, and gingiva." Turns out the dead squid's spermatophores were still active despite the creature being dead. Squid a Day has more on this bizarre story:
Each spermatophore includes an ejaculatory apparatus, which can expel the sperm mass quite forcefully, and a cement body for attachment. 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). I've written a bit about this mystery before. As it turns out, no one is quite sure how spermatophores implant themselves into skin.
But whatever the details, it's happened to humans more than once. An earlier case study reports "sperm stings" from consumption of raw squid, but the recent Journal of Parasitology paper is the first report I've seen of spermatophore activity in a cooked squid (parboiled, to be specific). That's . . . quite impressive, actually.
Eww, but before you swear off calamari for good, just now that most Western preparation methods tend to remove the internal organs from squid leaving just the muscle to munch on, meaning you're less likely going to end up ingesting any leftover squid sperm.But whatever the details, it's happened to humans more than once. An earlier case study reports "sperm stings" from consumption of raw squid, but the recent Journal of Parasitology paper is the first report I've seen of spermatophore activity in a cooked squid (parboiled, to be specific). That's . . . quite impressive, actually.


