He took out a pick, opened his mouth and found something unpleasant | the Chronicle

A young man went fishing The cap, as usual and he never imagined what he was going to discover when he opened the mouth of the peak he took out.

Don Marx He couldn’t wait to see the song he had released, but when he opened his mouth he found that inside he had a creepy parasite that had eaten his tongue. The louse bit the blood vessels of the tongue and drank from it until it fell.

“Being a marine scientist and having fished from a young age, I have seen a fair amount of parasites living on fish and sharks.

Marx, who studies marine biology, had heard of the “tongue-eating lice” but he had never seen one in the wild so he took a photo to document the moment.

The animal usually lives for life in the animal’s mouth and although there was prior knowledge of the situation, few images of such a thing existed.

The young man sent the photo to Northwestern University zoologist Nico Smit, who was excited about the find.

“Being a marine scientist and having fished from a very young age, I have seen a fair amount of parasites living on fish and sharks.”, he claimed.

Tongue-eating lice have been known for decades, but it is only in recent years that extensive studies of their life cycle and behavior have been initiated.

It is believed that all species of tongue-eating lice begin their lives as males, drifting in the ocean and looking for fish to cling to.

What we knew so far

In 2020, a group of scientists from Rice University x-rayed the head of a fish and discovered a parasite that had eaten its tongue and then replaced its place.

The biologist Kory evans, associate professor in the biosciences department, revealed on his Twitter account that it is an isopod crustacean called “Cymothoa exigua”.