But then again, we know they definitely don’t have penises on their heads. So sure, there’s still much we don’t know about the chimaeras. Then again, Long cautions that it may be that she just takes her sweet time laying them, and that they eventually do drop and settle on the seafloor. “She'll be swimming around dragging the two eggs behind her, and some people think that might actually be a form of what’s called egg guarding.” Instead of dropping her eggs on the seafloor and leaving them to the mercy of predation, she just totes them along. “She'll lay the eggs, but that little tendril will still be in her cloaca,” says Long. Chimaeras, though, have a rather more peculiar way of going about things: Females drag a pair of eggs along with them by a tendril. Now, while some mother sharks lay eggs, others will allow the young to develop inside themselves and emerge relatively developed. “But it is involved in copulation, the same way that your arms are when you're with your significant whoever, holding them close and hopefully being a little more successful by using your arms rather than not using your arms.” (While I declared a few weeks ago that science’s greatest analogy ever was a researcher telling me that a female octopus wringing out a male’s disembodied, sperm-packed arm onto her eggs was like squirting soy sauce onto rice, Long’s analogy here is a close second.) Sharks and chimaeras don’t even technically have penises in the first place. And second, while the structure is probably helping the chimaera fertilize the female, it’s definitely not a penis. “And somebody will write another article saying ‘the shark with the penis on the head.’” Well, sir, that stops right here.įirst of all, it's not a shark.

Chimera fish