Squid ‘spermatophores’ get stuck in diner’s mouth

A 63-year-old Korean woman who was dining on boiled squid was horrified to discover that sperm from the squid had painfully stuck to her tongue and cheeks.

The Squid A Day site reports that the woman experienced severe pain in her mouth after biting into the squid. The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) explains what happened in further detail:

"She did not swallow the portion, but spat it out immediately. She complained of a pricking and foreign-body sensation in the oral cavity. Twelve small, white spindle-shaped, bug-like organisms stuck in the mucous membrane of the tongue, cheek, and gingiva were completely removed, along with the affected mucosa," the article abstract states.

"On the basis of their morphology and the presence of the sperm bag, the foreign bodies were identified as squid spermatophores."

Squid A Day notes that the squid's internal organs are normally removed when the squid is prepared for a dish, so this is not something the average consumer should have to worry about. When diners orders squid in a restaurant, they are typically served only edible parts, such as the cleaned tentacles and body sac.

And while the incident with this woman is creepy, painful and weird, it's not entirely without precedent. A report from NCBI in 2011 gave a similar case of squid spermatophores stinging a person's mouth, but that occurred after the person was eating raw squid. Again, it would seem as if the squid had not been properly prepared for consumption.

Interestingly, the site also says that squid spermatophores are perfectly safe to handle, as they are not powerful enough to stick to the outside of the human body.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/squid-spermatophores-stuck-diner-mouth-202402937.html%3b_ylt=Al.jJZN0BVRGJXke4eSeOyftiBIF%3b_ylu=X3oDMTNyb3FxcW03BG1pdANUb3BTdG9yeSBPZGRVU1NGBHBrZwM4MTk0NGUwMS1jZWRkLTM0MmEtYjYzYS03NzE4M2FlZTRkNzQEcG9zAzIwBHNlYwN0b3Bfc3RvcnkEdmVyA2U1MGUwZDcxLWI2NWUtMTFlMS1iZWVhLWM2ZWY2ZWEwYTI3NA--%3b_ylg=X3oDMTFlamZvM2ZlBGludGwDdXMEbGFuZwNlbi11cwRwc3RhaWQDBHBzdGNhdAMEcHQDc2VjdGlvbnM-%3b_ylv=3

Man-Eater Swallowed by Man: Tigers As Food

Once in a while tigers make international news, like the white tiger in Las Vegas that mauled illusionist Roy Horn of Siegfried and Roy, or the one that escaped from its confines and killed a teenager at the San Francisco Zoo. Most of the time, though, the news is about tigers being eaten by man.

The latest involves the arrest of a man last month with three dead tigers in the trunk of his car in Nghe An province, Vietnam. He was delivering them to Hanoi where tiger meat is consumed illegally. There a few months earlier a woman was arrested , her second offense for selling tiger meat at her restaurant. It seems the trade proves too lucrative -- $1,000 per 100 grams of tiger meat -- to give up, especially now that there are fewer than 50 tigers left in the wild.

For poachers a tiger could fetch as much as $10,000, and its meat, organs, bones, and skin are sold in restaurants and specialty shops for 10 times the price. As the tiger population dwindles, demand for it is at an all-time high.

Indeed, if there is a cultural matrix in East Asia, it is the longing for what the Chinese call Ye-Wei, or "wild taste." More than a decade ago, I visited Vietnam's border with China at Lang Son. I watched as hundreds of Vietnamese carried baskets of monkeys, pangolins, snakes, and a variety of exotic birds in rattan cages. On the way back, their baskets held electric fans, water pumps, rice cookers, farm tools, TVs, VCRs, jeans and T-shirts. As one young man put it, "I can always sell forest animals to China. They buy everything we have. They have a big appetite for wild taste."

The once ferocious tiger has been reduced to a mere commodity, to be farmed and poached, collected for its parts, and made into balms, pills, soaked in wine. Statistics on the amount of wildlife being eaten are not known, but there are some local guesses. The China Wildlife Conservation Association estimates that 10,000 tons of snakes are consumed a year in China, and several thousand tons of wild birds are consumed in restaurants each year, not to mention badgers, frogs, bats and other wildlife.

Read on:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-lam/tiger-meat_b_1584070.html?ref=weird-news&ir=Weird%20News