Fact Friday
The tongue-eating louse lives up to its name, or at least the females do. She enters a fish’s body through the gills and cuts off the circulation to the fish’s tongue. When the tongue falls off, she becomes the fish’s new tongue, feeding on the fish’s blood and/or mucus.
Cymothoa exigua By Marco Vinci [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0] 1 September 2013 via Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cymothoa_exigua_parassita_Lithognathus_mormyrus.JPG.
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