Biggest balls in the world belong to tiny cricket
And the prize for the biggest balls in the animal kingdom goes to...the finger sized tuberous bushcricket.
It's balls account for 14 percent of the body mass of males, on a human this would be the equivalent to each testicle being as big as a human head!
Although that image is somewhat frightening to any member of the human species the little bush cricket doesn't have to worry about huge balls bouncing around with every jump as the two testicales are neatly tucked into it's tiny body.
"I was amazed by the size of the testes—they seemed to take up the entire abdomen," said study leader Karim Vahed, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Derby.
The previous record holder's testicles belonged to the fruit fly Drosophila bifurca which tipped the scales at about 11 percent of its body mass.
However, the new heavyweight champion doesn't pack much of a punch. The scientists were surprised to discover that tuberous bushcrickets have smaller ejaculations than other bushcricket species with smaller testicles, which will make males of all species sigh with relief as they can still cling on to the old wife's tale that size doesn't matter.
In fact research suggests the big testes are for mating with many females, not producing competitive volumes of sperm for each encounter.
Across the animal kingdom research has shown that male testicle size is correlated to the degree of promiscuity within a given species. So...this means that the more partners a female has, the larger the male's testicles are likely to be. What that says about us humans we leave to the scientists to figure out at a later stage.
