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 31, 2025
Tunicates
Although tunicates may at first glance appear to be related to sponges or sea anemones, they’re actually in the same phylum as humans and other vertebrates – Chordata. In their larval form, tunicates look like tadpoles, with a notochord and nerve chord (which become the spine and spinal cord in vertebrates).
Photo Credit: Ken Marks
