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.
April 18, 2025
Spotted Moray Eel
How do you eat when you don’t have appendages? Snakes on land have an expandable jaw that allows them to move their jaws forward in order to eat their prey whole. Eels do not have this capability. Eels, like this spotted moray eel (Gymnothorax moringa), have two sets of jaws to help them feed. The oral jaws capture the prey, while the phalangeal jaws reach towards the oral jaws to pull the prey into its throat.
Photo Credit: Andrew Bruckner
