The Weird Tongue-eating Louse…
A parasite that replaces a fish’s tongue… with its own body!
Imagine you’ve just landed a fish after a day on the water. You reach down to remove the hook and as you lever out the hook and open the fish’s mouth, what do you see staring back at you, but the face of a large bug which has replaced the fish’s tongue.
You drop the fish in shock and instant revulsion. What is THAT?
1. The unpleasant lifestyles of parasites…
A parasite is an organism which lives on or inside a host, feeding on the host in some way. Parasites easily raise our hackles and trigger revulsion. We think of creatures like hookworms and vampire bats and tapeworms, and shiver.
It is easy to imagine being a cheetah sprinting at 60 miles per hour to run down a springbok, taking it down, clamping down on its windpipe until it expires, then chowing down. I don’t think anyone fantasizes about being a hookworm.
One of the more spectacularly revolting parasites is the isopod Cymothoa exigua, which removes and replaces a fish’s tongue.
This is such a weird and intriguing lifestyle, that it is worth biting down on our revulsion to take a closer peek at this creature.
