Tongue-eating louse
The tongue-eating louse is a sea cousin of the woodlice you find under stones. It has a flat body made of segments and 14 sharp legs. It lives inside the mouth of a fish and does a very strange job: it takes the place of the fish's tongue.
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Fun facts
It is the only animal known to take the place of a body part of another animal.
The fish can still use it like a tongue to hold its food.
Every one starts life as a male, and some turn into females later.
It can live for up to three years and grows together with its fish.
A mother carries more than 400 eggs in a pouch under her body, like all woodlice do.
Most asked questions about Tongue-eating louse
?Is the tongue-eating louse dangerous to people?
No. It only lives in the mouths of fish.
?What does the tongue-eating louse do?
It gets into a fish's mouth through the gills, holds on to the tongue until the tongue is gone, and then works as the fish's new tongue.
?How big is the tongue-eating louse?
Females are 8 to 29 millimetres long, and males about 7.5 to 15 millimetres.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Cymothoa exigua
- Group
- Woodlice
- Family
- Cymothoidae
- Classification
- Malacostraca > Isopoda > Cymothoidae
- Lives on
- North America, South America
Where the facts come from
- Cymothoa exigua (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by Marco Vinci. CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.
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