We regret to inform you that a woman’s tongue was never pregnant with baby squid

Well this is perhaps one of the strangest clarifications we’ve ever seen.

There have been a whole bunch of reports flying around in the past day or two that a Korean 63-year-old woman’s tongue was pregnant with baby squid after she ate calamari.

We read about it from The Sun and The Mirror in recent days, and it’s a pretty wild yean.

Apparently, a woman was eating partially-cooked squid and failed to remove the poor guy’s internal organs.

When she bit into it, she bit into his active ejaculatory apparatus.

Yum.

Immediately, she felt pain in her mouth and spat the undercooked seafood out.

But she could still feel something, as if there were bugs burrowing into her mouth.

Doctors wrote about this in a report published by Pathology International.

“We found that several small whitish spindle‐shaped stings were stuck to the mucous membrane of the hard palate,” they said.

“The biopsy showed that the sperm bags of the squid had thrust into the squamous epithelium [tissue in the woman’s mouth] of the patient.”

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A later report published by the Journal of Parasitology didn’t make things sound any better.

Heck, it was even called: Penetration of the oral mucosa by parasite-like sperm bags of squid.

The result was a bunch of headlines that sounded like the woman’s tongue had been knocked up by a half-cooked squid.

And with words like “penetration”, “sperm bags” and “thrust” being thrown around, you can kind of understand.

This all happened after the second report went live, with the story blowing up some time around February, 2012.

But it’s since come out that this was all a bit of a beat up.

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A report from Snopes journo Dan Evon clarifies that the woman’s tongue was never pregnant with squid babies.

Published last month, this fact check makes the important distinction that the woman’s mouth was only ever sprayed with the squid’s sperm capsules.

Big difference.

“Doctors removed squid spermatophores, a capsule containing the squid sperm, from this woman’s mouth,” Evon wrote.

“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.

“This woman was not impregnated by a squid; she did not spit out baby squids.”

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The story is retrending now, a few weeks following the Snopes debunking, after Tom Hale wrote about it for IFL Science on Monday.

And with the concept being as nuts as it was, it was picked up pretty quickly by sites like LAD Bible, sending it viral once again.

Here’s a snippet from the abstract of the article fuelling this cycle:

“Twelve small, white spindle-shaped, bug-like organisms stuck in the mucous membrane of the tongue, cheek, and gingiva were completely removed… on the basis of their morphology and the presence of the sperm bag, the foreign bodies were identified as squid spermatophores.”

And yeah, while she didn’t have a swarm of squid babies burst from her tongue, that still sounds pretty bad.

So, what can we learn from this?

First and foremost: try to avoid eating the uncooked reproductive organs of squid.

But the overwhelming takeaway from this is that people love reading about gross, slightly sexual seafood stories that hint at cross-species impregnation.

Long story short: we’re all sick puppies.