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Welcome to stuff to blow your mind from how stuff works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
We are recording this just before Thanksgiving.
And you will get to listen to it sometime after Thanksgiving.
So for those of you who engage in this holiday of culinary excess, then you will, you'll probably be stuffed a bit.
You'll be kind of filled with food.
So this podcast is for you to to to maybe help with your digestion, to maybe make you think, well, maybe I don't have it that bad after all.
It could have been worse.
Or or maybe you you may end up thinking I could have had a little more help, eating that food than I actually had.
Because you probably had to do most of the chewing and swallowing and and manipulating of the food in your mouth all by your lonesome.
So we're going to bring you a little topic today that's, think of it as a palate cleanser or, as you say, an aid, in your next foray into culinary indulgence.
We are talking specifically about a tongue eating parasite.
Which we will now refer to as the isopod.
This is a fantastic creature.
If you have not seen a picture of this, go to the blog post that we're gonna put out to go along with this episode.
You'll see some photos or some links to some photos and embedded video to to reacquaint yourself with this parasite that essentially, spoiler, takes the place of a fish's tongue.
It is actually when there's things that's like truth is stranger than fiction.
Because it's very hard to, I think, dream up this creature, but here it is.
And I don't to my knowledge, no one had dreamed this one up before.
You know, we everyone loves a good parasite in a horror movie.
Stuff busting out of chest, living in people's blood.
Like, but this sounds like something like the only thing in fiction that I can think of is it it sounds like something that they would have made up for Invader Zim.
Like, it's that level of just twisted, but also, like, it's it's gross and dark, but also kind of silly in a way.
Well, let's get into the the meat of it as it were
Let's describe what this this isopod crustacean is.
Well, outside of its eventual home inside of a fish's face, it's a 1 inch long which is, like a crustacean.
that most of us, I think, will be familiar
with is a little thing called a pill bug or we always call them roly polys.
Those little little segmented, because they're they're segmented, kinda like a little armored dudes.
Much like the roly poly, the the pill bug, When you poke it with your finger, when you find it outside, it rolls up into a ball.
So it's kin to that and looks a lot like that except it's pale.
One inch long, lives in the water, shell covered, leggy, segmented.
And on its underside, it has dozens of sharp cruel looking claws.
And it reminds me kind of like a cockroach, even though it's it's much more segmented.
It's just opaque white and very leggy in appearance, as you say.
Particularly, it's got 2 big claws sticking out.
And, you know, it's got a pretty prominent, face and eyes, which is very disturbing.
Because it's not only that you peer inside a fish's mouth and you see a creature, because you wouldn't necessarily register that it's a creature.
You see like a white lump that looks kinda like a tongue, but it has eyes.
It can be found in the Gulf of California, south to north of the Gulf of Guayaquil in Ecuador.
And it's also been found off the coast of California in New Jersey as well as off the coast in the UK.
So it's been popping up in different places that people did not expect, and we'll talk a little bit more about that later on in the podcast.
But let's get down to the nitty gritty about how it does, what it does, how it actually takes over the tongue of the fish.
So it starts out, of course, on the outside of a fish.
It's just swimming around.
And then it comes up to a snapper.
Goes into the gills and into the creature's mouth.
And then it latches on to the tongue.
So its first big feast, of course, is it's gonna start drinking some tongue blood.
And there's not a lot of room, you know, in a mouth.
Like think of your own mouth.
Like just it's kind of a horrifying thought.
But, you know, just feel your tongue sitting there in your skull.
And it's kinda gross, you know, because it's just this lump that lives in your mouth.
So the isopod is think well, it's not really thinking.
But if I can anthropomorphize it a little bit, it's like it says, hey, this place is great.
I just need to move this guy out, the tongue.
If I can get this guy out of here because the tongue is like the tongue's got a pretty good deal.
It's just sitting here in the mouth.
If I get rid of the tongue, I can totally steal that job.
I can do it just as well as this lump of tongue can do, and then I'll have access to
And so it cozies up to the tongue artery.
It begins to drain it until the tongue starts to wither away and atrophy.
And that's when the fish decides that or excuse me, not the fish, but the isopod decides that it's going to hang out and act as the tongue for the fish.
And what I think is fascinating about this is that it does kinda start out as sort of like tiny sea lice.
And then, as you say, it does attach itself to the gills, and it begins to develop.
And then the female is the one that makes its way to the tongue and and really takes up residence.
And by that time, it is full grown.
It is this creature living in the mouth of the fish.
And we've talked about symbiotic relationships in nature before.
But this is one of those situations where you kinda have to wonder, you know, is this mutualism or is it truly parasitism?
Because the fish can still live.
I mean, even even in situations where we think something's a straight up parasite situation or straight up mutualism situation, it's often not that cut and dry.
It's there's a whole lot of gray area.
And even with with something like this, which on the surface sounds pretty parasitic.
Like if something crawled into my mouth, ate my tongue and replaced it, I'd be a little upset and and and a little insulted.
But but you would probably say to yourself, an isopod tongue is better than no tongue at all.
Certainly, we'll get into this more.
But, I mean, certainly people can get used to a lot of weirdness with their body over time.
Maybe maybe this is one of those things.
But I mean for starters, a 2003 study found that fish with the parasites in their mouth, they did have lower blood counts than the ones that still had tongues intact.
So it's clear that they are drinking some blood in there.
They are actively engaging in some blood drinking.
But then the other thing is that, yes, they are eating food that comes through the mouth as well.
And they did even, say that when when the isopod is in there, that it will act as the tongue and actually kinda trap the prey Mhmm.
As a tongue would against the teeth and help out the fish in that instance.
It's totally making me rethink all the things my tongue does.
You don't think of your tongue as a creature, but it kind of is.
It's just it's like the guardian that lives in your mouth and chases after bits of Twizzler.
Again, You're still on the Twizzler kick?
Well, it's just it's probably the tongue's greatest enemy, you know?
There's a lot of war between that.
Because the Twizzler latches onto the tooth and then the tongue goes in and battles it for like an hour.
That and the those little gummy things.
Any the the really hard ones, the dots.
I'm not familiar with them.
Oh, well, they're they're pretty rough.
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So if an isopod was actually replacing the human tongue, what sort of relationship do you think it would have with a toothbrush?
I guess it depends how much tongue brushing you do.
You're supposed to do a certain amount of tongue brushing.
I don't think it would take kindly to that.
I don't think it would either.
I think it would be an adversary.
So, what I think is really fascinating about this about this isopod taking the place of the tongue is that this is the first known case of a parasite that actually replaces an organ Yes.
So, I mean, it's phenomenal to see this.
It's it's, you know, spectacular looking.
But the fact of the matter that it that it is taking over an organ in the actual host is is pretty cool.
Because like we said, it it gets in there and it's not just a situation where it says, I'm where the tongue is.
Now I'm gonna eat all the food.
It actually behaves like a tongue.
It actually helps pass food back, to the the to its host.
Like it's not it's not just gonna wanna kill its host.
It's got a pretty good deal going, but it needs to make sure some food gets through for it to continue this strange existence.
And then like you said, the parasite is replacing an organ and and you just don't see this anywhere else in the known animal world.
It would be like if a a parasite came up to you, and said, that's a pretty good eyeball you've got there.
Let me eat that eyeball and take its place.
You know, it's like it's that level of of of just it's crazy.
Like nature again, nature is stranger and more twisted than anything we come up with, in our own horror, on the side.
That's the truth right there because it really is horrific looking.
So we had mentioned that this isopod has been popping up in unusual places Yeah.
Like the coast of the UK.
And scientists think that the reason for this is connected to overfishing.
Like it's worth noting that we've known about this for a while.
Like I blogged about it a few years back, and people have known of this creature for even even longer.
think 1983 is probably, probably the first time someone was like, what is in that recent
years, which leads credence to this idea that we're actually seeing more instances of this parasite.
There's more of it out there.
And in one possibility here is that it all comes down to over efficient.
Carl Zimmerman did a piece on this for Discover Magazine.
Of course, he's the author of the book Parasite Rex.
So he's all about looking at what parasites are doing and how parasites are are changing and evolving.
In particular, he was looking at a study that looked at one population off the coast of France where fish were living in a protected marine environment, and then they looked at another marine environment off the coast of Italy that is heavily fished.
And in protected waters, the scientists found 30% of the fish had parasites in their mouth.
In the fish waters, 47% dead.
So that's a a 17% increase in the heavily fished areas.
Well, you know what's crazy about that is that nearly half of the fish half of the fish in those particular waters
Have this creature in their mouth.
So we know what happens, of course, is that every once in a while, some of these show up in the grocery store.
You know, you might get a mackerel.
You might be in Canada and get a mackerel and then realize that, you know, this creature is staring at you.
And you just expect it to jump out and do the the the space balls dance on the table, you know?
Because it has that weird kind of cute little face, like it's It does.
In which it totally makes sense, about why the recent The Bay movie came out, which is centered around this isopod.
I meant to try and and watch it because it's available right now for, like, paid streaming on on certain websites.
They're doing that now where it's something will be in the theater, and then it's almost instantly or instantly available elsewhere to to stream.
This this movie is like a found footage horror film where it's due to an ecological disaster.
Suddenly, they're like isopod rewired zombies running wild and people are freaking out over it.
The idea is that these isopods mutate because they're exposed to a massive massive amount of steroid rich chicken waste, which somehow makes them want to taste human flesh
And then take over a human.
So, of course, we take this idea and we try to figure out, like, the worst little isopod was talking to me.
So, of course, this is bunk, though.
This is a creature for fish and off fish.
So the chances I mean, it's just not gonna happen.
It's this is not our bodies are not the habitat for this creature.
But if it did, I think we should give a listen to what it might sound like if it were talking to us.
I'm Symophia Exidua, your new tongue.
Remember that fish sandwich you ate last night?
That's from a little, YouTube video, which we'll also include on the blog entry that accompanies this episode.
But it's the idea is that dude wakes up and he has the isopod living in his mouth and it's bossing him around.
Which I think would happen, right, if they're gonna do adult or to adults, to humans Yep.
But, again, this is not something that could happen.
And even if you were to eat a fish, a mackerel, But, you know, we can't help it but think about it because it
But, you know, we can't help it but think about it because it is a stunning and grotesque example of how cruel and twisted I mean, that's again, that's human terms.
Cruel and twisted nature really is.
Like it's kind of a wake up call.
We were like, woah, this is not kittens and puppies here.
This is a parasite eating a creature's tongue and then becoming its tongue.
And the fish is, if not totally fine with it, the fish at least is like, yeah, like you say, it's better than having no tongue at all.
But I do think it's interesting how overfishing is certainly something that is helping along this creature.
That more, the evolution of small fish is actually occurring.
And then of course, the small fish can't really defend themselves and so they're being taken over by this
It's I mean, it's just another example of how you have any kind of unbalancing of an ecological system and of the natural habitat, things are gonna get out of whack.
And when they get out of whack, that might mean monsters living inside the heads of bunches of fishes.
And then eventually, humans just being taken over as well.
The parasite that wanted to become a tongue.
If anyone out there who's seen the movie The Bay and wants to share their thoughts in the film with us, we'd certainly love to hear about that.
I'm I'm actually more interested in it now.
Because I remember seeing some posters for it or like a trailer for it.
And I was like, you know, I'm not really looking for another found footage horror film right now.
And, you know, I wasn't all that interested.
But then I found out that Barry Levinson is the director of the film.
