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  • 2018-05-17 (xsd:date)
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  • Did a Woman Become Pregnant from Eating Squid? (en)
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  • A series of misleading and exaggerated headlines over the span of several years turned a story about a woman's painful dining experience into a rumor about getting pregnant from a squid — via mouth. This turned into a battle of headlines as the facts . For example, an article published by The Sun in 2012 read: Woman 'pregnant' with 12 baby squid. Not to be outdone, the Mirror reported that the South Korean woman had become pregnant by squid and warned readers that they should be careful when putting seafood in your mouth because you could end up spitting out babies. Stories about the squeam-inducing squid encounter have been published by a wide range of outlets over the years. Most recently, this story was featured on an episode of Weird Wild World from the Facebook page Nameless.tv: Some truth underlies these stories, but associated headlines (as well as some of the details) are severely misleading or wholly inaccurate and have led some readers to believe that a woman was impregnated by a squid via her mouth. The most misleading aspect of this rumor comes down to the words pregnant or impregnate. Although these words were frequently employed by outlets presumably hoping to generate clicks on their stories, they are inaccurate. The episode of Weird Wild World was actually referring to a case report originally published in Pathology International in September 2011: This woman, who was identified as a 63-year-old Korean woman in a subsequent report in the Journal of Parasitology, ate a sperm bag while ingesting a piece of raw squid. As Science 2.0 -- one of the first web sites to pick up on this story when it first went viral in June 2012 -- noted in their report about these rumors, there is a big difference between inseminate and impregnate:\ Exaggerated reports went one step further, claiming that the unfortunate woman had squid babies removed from where they had become embedded in her mouth: A 63-year-old woman has become 'pregnant' with 12 baby squid after eating calamari. This is another severe exaggeration. Doctors removed squid spermatophores, a capsule containing the squid sperm, from this woman's mouth. For a number of scientific reasons (a human woman's mouth is not the same as a female squid egg), these sperms never developed into baby squids. Although the story is bizarre, it is not without precedent. Several similar cases have been documented in various medical journals. A 2012 report in Zoomorphology examines these cases and explains that spermatophore attachment is autonomous (meaning it can occur without the aid of male or female squid) making the consumption of raw male squid a potentially hazardous dining experience: Medical journals have documented several instances of people being stung by spermatophores after ingesting raw squid, but these reports, specifically an instance from 2011, were grossly misrepresented with clickbait headlines. (en)
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