#258: Mating Habits of the Suburban Anglerfish

Artie originally drew the male anglerfish to look more or less like the female, without the dress and cleavage. Slothrop immediately went to Wikipedia to support his belief that Anglerfish are sexually dimorphic and the males are considerably smaller and don’t have “little dangly things” on their heads. He seemed to know a lot about Anglerfish, except what you call the little dangly thing. Anyway, Slothrop was right. So Artie redrew it. He’s happy to do this when confronted with things that’ll probably show up in the comments later. Since we were on the topic, we all huddled around Hanelore’s phone & watched some disturbing NatGeo videos on YouTube, in which we learned that Anglerfish mate with the male biting into the female until his face fuses into her body and they begin to share a circulatory system, at which point they literally become one & his body begins to atrophy, and then he exists as just a kind of fishy clump attached to her body as she swims the deep sea looking for her next mating partner. So Artie added the cleavage to indicate this is her third marriage. And he decided this is Part 1, bc he senses a franchise opportunity here that I don’t quite see myself. So we might be in for more details of the courtship between Aurora and Phil, especially as Artie’s enjoying teasing Syd with this imagery on their ongoing discussion about the wedding/honeymoon plans. Syd’s warming up the TiVo for Shark Week. -Ed.