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.
January 17, 2025
Ctenophores
Modern ctenophores, or comb jellies, are soft-bodied, meaning they are 95% water and have no hard body parts. Ctenophore fossils from the Cambrian period indicate that the ancient form of these creatures had a hard skeleton. Scientists believe this skeleton was part of a trend to “armor up” during the Cambrian due to intense predation.
Photo Credit: Ken Marks
