When biologist Kory Evans was digitizing X-rays of fish skeletons last August 10, he was not expecting to find something horrific in one particular wrasse. "Mondays aren't usually this eventful," he said on the tweet he posted on that day. What he found was “a "vampire" crustacean [that] had devoured, then replaced, its host's tongue.”
The buglike isopod, also called a tongue biter or tongue-eating louse, keeps sucking its blood meals from a fish's tongue until the entire structure withers away. Then the true horror begins, as the parasite assumes the organ's place in the still-living fish's mouth.
But how does this isopod do this? Find out over at Live Science.
Creepy!
(Image Credit: Kory Evans PhD/ Twitter)