This bizarre vampire parasite becomes a living tongue inside fish heads – SYFY WIRE

Sometimes the horrors of the natural world seem like something straight out of a gore-fueled midnightfright flick, and this petrifyingparasite that feeds off fish heads then acts as a substitute tongue is certainly no exception.

Gird yourself, then meet abug-like, armored isopod also known asa tongue biter or tongue-eating louse.This gruesomecreature dines on the fresh blood supply found in a fish tongue until the whole structure shrinks and finallydisappears.

But that's actually the normal part of this predatory assault.After the vampire louse has satiated itself and dispensed with the withered fish tongue, it takes the place of the atrophiedorgan inside the still-breathing fish!

This horror-show discovery was made by biologistDr. Kory Evans, an assistant professor in the Department of BioSciences at Houston's Rice University.

He stumbled across the crazy tongue-transforming crustacean during a long sessiondigitizing X-rays of fish skeletons and immediatelyshared the disturbing images on Twitter last week, even joking that"Mondays aren't usually this eventful."

Such are the oddities of nature. Feeling faint? Sipwater and stay with us.

Evans' project over the last few years involvesscanning and measuring skull shapes fora groupof marine fish called wrasses to understand evolutionary traits. Hidden in the mouth cavity of one of the specimens, Odax cyanollix, he spiedwhat appeared to be a tinycrustacean.

While I was placing landmarks inside the mouth of one of the fishes, I realized that the inside of the mouth was pretty crowded, he explained to USA Today. "After a few minutes of hard staring, I realized that I was looking at a tongue-eating louse."

These parasitic fiends arehardly rare and approximately 380 kindsof tongue-eating isopods have been identified. This disgusting species normally enterfish through theirgills, then attachesto the fish tongue where it nourishes itself on the organ'sblood vessels and eventually completely replaces it.

Tongue-eating lice commonly feedon saltwater game fishand, besides becoming a changeling tongue for the animal, actually do not cause the fish any harm at all. Tell that to the tongue-less, ocean-dwelling victim!

In an even more bizarre twist, this unusual relationshipbetween fish andliving tongue often lasts for years, with the parasite sometimes dying much earlier than the host fish.

"Its nothing for humans to worry about, beyond the visceral reaction ofhearing the phrase "tongue-eating lice."" Evans added."But it is a fascinating look into our fishy friends. Theyre barely anything for fishes to worry about, apparently.

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This bizarre vampire parasite becomes a living tongue inside fish heads - SYFY WIRE

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero