A foundational memory for me was a fish dissection in middle school in which we respectfully sliced the innards of one of these bad boys only to find this exact parasite inside. All the other groups just had a fish to dissect, but we also took a supercurricular lab detour to dissect that other thing too, as my classmates from other groups gathered around with real curiosity.
Frankly haven’t thought much of it in years. Would be cool to know what this is actually called.
Oh wow, the first one sounds mean. Never heard of an isopod parasite (but I’d now guess there are many more aquatic ones?). And inducing necrosis of the tongue to be the new fish’s organ, ouch :O
And what a wild ride the second story is! Thanks for sharing :)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymothoa_exigua
This is an example of the type of tongue-replacing creature you found, not necessarily the same species.
So that’s a fun twofer: you know a possible name for what you saw, and you know that a parasite replacing a host’s organ is one of nature’s fun survival strategies!
Horrifying. Thanks for the link, although to be honest I probably could have googled “fish tongue parasite isopod” at some point in the past decade+.
Interesting that the Wikipedia page has photos that wouldn’t have rang the bell for me, the one I remember was exactly like the one in the post.
Edit: the article describes a habitat that is pretty far from me, this was in Lebanon in the eastern Mediterranean over a decade ago. Could be a similar species.
That sounds fascinating woah
For anyone else who is as curious as I was: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/butterflies-parasitic-wasps-finland
This would make a good Alien movie. We’ll call it-- Alienception!
well that’s just a lot of fun
Uff
It’s wasps all the way down…
It’s like capitalism inside your capitalism
Alright, time to burn down all of Finland. Just reduce everything to ash. In fact, nuke the ash after we’re done. Maybe add some salt after that. Nothing can live there anymore.
We’ll just be extra careful this time, can’t have a second Australia situation.
You have no chance. They have knives and no care.
