Parasite Got Your Tongue?

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 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 manipulating of the food in your mouth all by your lonesome.

That's right. 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 uh. In your next foray into culinary indulgence. We are talking specifically about a tongue eating parasite, yes, sigh motha exegua, which we will now refer to as the I pod. Yes, the I pod. 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 some of that 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. Yeah, and don't to my knowledge, no one had dreamed this one up before. Um, you know we everyone loves a good

parasite in a horror movie. Stuff busting out of chess, living in people's blood, I mean, you name it, they've done it. Like, but this sounds something like the only thing in fiction that I can think of is 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. Oh yes, it's very silly. Well, let's get into the meat of it, as it were

in topic, Yeah, the tongue meat of it. Let's describe what this, this pod crustacean is, all right, Well, outside of its eventual home inside of a fish's face, it's a one inch long isopod, which is like a crustacean,

all right, it's kin. It's close at kin that most of us I think will be familiar with is a little thing called a pillbug, or we always call them roly polis, those little little segmented because they're they're segmented, kind of like a little armored dudes, right, much like the roly poli, the pillbug that 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 it 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. Yeah, 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 legging in appearance. As you say, it's it's got the claws, particularly that it's got two big claws sticking out, and you know, it's got a

pretty prominent face and eyes, which is very disturbing. Yeah, because it's not only that you peer inside of 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 kind of like a tongue, but it

has eyes and it's staring at you. And they can be found in the Gulf of California south to north of the Gulf of guy a Quill in Ecuador, and it's also been found off the coast of California and New Jersey as well as off the coast in the UK. So it's been kind of popping up in different places that people did not expect. And we'll talk a little bit more about that later on the podcast, but let's get down to the nitty gritty of out how it does what it does, how it actually takes over the

tongue of the fish. Yeah, so it starts out, of course, on the outside of a fish. It's just swimming around. It's yeah, and then it comes up to a snapper all right, goes into the gills and into the creature's mouth, and then it latches onto the tongue. So it's first big feast, of course, is it's gonna start drinking some

tongue blood. It's nutritious, it's readily available, and there's not a lot of room, you know, in amount, like think of your own mouth, like just it's kind of a horrifying thought, but you know, you just feel your tongue setting there in your skull all the time. You know, I don't move it just a lot. And it's kind of gross, you know, because it's just this lump that lives in your mouth. So the ice apot is think

what's not really thinking. But if I can antromomorphize it a little bit, it's like it says, Hey, this place is great. I just need to move this guy out the tongue. And I can get this guy out of here because the tongue is like, the tongue's got a pretty good deal. It's just setting here in the mouth, foods passing by. If I get rid of the tongue, I can totally steal that job. I can do it just as well as the slump of tongue can do,

and then I'll have access to food. And so it cozies up to the tongue artery it begins to drain it until the tongue starts to wither away in atrophy. And that's when the fish decides that excuse me on the fish with the iypod decides that it is going to hang out and act as the tongue for the fish.

And when I think it's fascinating about this is that it does kind of start out as sort of like tiny sea lice, and then as you say, it does attach itself to the gills and um, it begins to develop and then the female is the one that makes it its way to the tongue and it really takes up residents 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 kind of have to wonder, you know, is this mutualism or is it truly parasitism because the fish can still live and we've talked before, 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 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 a little insulted. But but but you would probably say to yourself, an isopod tongue is better than no tongue at all. Right, Well, maybe 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. Two three study found that fish with the parasites in their mouth they did have lower blood counts than the ones that still had tongues in tag. 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. Yeah, and they did even say that when when the I pod is in there, that it will act as the tongue and actually kind of trap the prey, as a tongue would against the teeth and help out the fish in that instance, if the totally making me rethink all the things my tongue does. You don't think of your tongue is 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.

Twizzler again, huh, 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 those little gummy things, any really hard ones, the dots, I'm

not familiar with them. They're they're pretty rough. Well okay, So if an isopod was actually replacing the human tongue, what sort of relationship do you think it would have with a toothbrush? Um? I guess it depend how much tongue brushing you do. You're supposed to do a certain amount of tongue brushing, right, I don't think it would take kindly to that. I don't think it would either.

I think it would be an adversary. All right. 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 of its host. 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 is taking

over an organ in the actual host is is pretty cool. Yeah, because like we said, 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. I'm gonna run this show. It actually behaves like a tongue. It actually helps pass food back to the to its host. Like it's not it's not just gonna want to kill a tongue. 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 parasite came up to you and said, that's a pretty good eyeball you've got there, I can do just as well. Let me eat that eyeball and take its place. You know. It's like it's that level 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, all right. So we had mentioned that this pod has been popping up in unusual places like the coast of the UK, and scientists think that the reason for this is connected to over fishing. Yeah, Like, it's worth noting that we've known about this for a while, Like I've blogged about it a few years back, and people have known of this creature for even even longer. I probably around the

first time someone was like, what is in that fish is? Now? So it's there's nothing new about it, but it is rare to find a live example of it, and we've certainly found more of them in 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 fishing. 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 involving in particularly. Who's 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 of the fish had parasites in their mouth in the fish waters dead. So that's a sevent 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 you 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 expected to jump out into the spaceballs dance on the table, you know, because it has that weird kind of cute little face like it's like it does it does, which totally makes sense about why the recent The Bay movie came out, which

is centered around this isopod. Yeah, I'm meant to try and watch it because it's available right now for like paid streaming 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 stream. But yeah, this this movie is like a found footage horror film where it's due to an ecological disaster. Suddenly they're like is pod rewired zombies running wild and people are freaking

out over it. Yeah. The idea is that these is A pods mutate because they're exposed to a massive, massive amount of steroid rich chicken waist, which somehow makes them want to uh 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 possible idea of what could happen, and that would be if you, Robert Lyn open your mouth right now and the little iPod was talking to me, so of course this is bunk though, right, this could never happen, right, This is a creature for fish and off fish, so the chances and 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 we were talking to us. Hey there kid, how you doing yeah with Jake last night? Yes, so that's hilarious. That's from a little YouTube video which will also include on the blog

entry that accompanies this episode. But it's the ideas that dude wakes up and he has the ice of pot living in his mouth and it's bossing him around, which I think would happen, right if they're going to do adults or to adults, to humans, human adults. But again, this is not something that could happen. And even if you were to eat a fish, a mackerel that had this parasite in it, you yourself would not become sick. There's just really no health hazards to it. It's just

sort of disgusting to think about. But you know, we can't help 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 where we're like, whoa, this is not kittens and puppies here. This is a parasite eating a creature's tongue and then becoming its tongue, and the fishes, if not totally fine with it, the fish at least is like yeah, like you said, it's

better than having no tongue at all. There you go. Yeah, yeah, But I do think it's interesting how overfishing is certainly something that is helping along in this creature that more, um, the evolution of small fish is actually occurring. And then of course as small fish can't really defend themselves and

so they were being taken over by this iopod. Yeah, 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 going to get out of whack. And when they get out of whack, that might mean monsters living inside the heads of bunches of fishes, right, and then eventually humans just being taken over as well. Yeah, so there you have it, the parasite that wanted to

become a tongue. 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 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, it wasn't all that interesting. But then I found out

that Barry Levinson is the director of the film. Uh. There was something on tree Hugger about I think it was an interview with Barry Levinson, and I think he said that he first approached this material because he was pitched um for as a documentary and over fishing, and um, you know what happens, we need to disturb the ecosystem. And so I think that's kind of funny that he took Now, he didn't just say, oh, this would make

a great Hollywood movie. I think that his point was that people pay attention more to the more fantastical elements of it, perhaps people would take home that message that this was really about an environmental concern as opposed to doing a documentary that some people wouldn't watch. Yeah, and for those of you aren't familiar with Darry Levinson, this guy is mostly known for stuff like high Anxiety rain Man.

He's not really a horror guy. Um no. But but the reviews for were actually pretty interesting, it seems like most reviews. And it's always hard with horror movies to tell to go buy reviews because not all movie reviewers are really going to get the genre. And then sometimes it's easy to go into a horror movie with the wrong expectations. But the consistents seem to be that it was maybe not as scary as one might want a horror film about tongue parasites to be, but it was

very uh, it really sucked you in. It was very very interesting in thought provoking. So there you go. I would be interested to hear I have not seen it, but I would love to hear from people who have. Indeed, and if you want to reach out to us about that or anything else parasites in general, other gross parasites that you've found that you think we should do an episode on You can find us on Facebook and you

can find us on tumbler. We are stuff to blow your mind on both of those and if you head on over to Twitter, our twitter handle is blow the Mind. And also wanted to give a quick shout out to our sister podcast, Pop Stuff. Make sure to give them a listen. They are a newer kid on the block, but they are well worth your time. And in fact, I think that you have mentioned before that they've done an outstanding podcasts on clowns and that's all as well

as myriad topics. Oh yeah, they cover clowns, they cover Twilight vampires. I mean it's a They have a great collection of episodes to ben Jon certainly as you travel around this holiday season with your bellies full of food and potentially your skull full of parasite. So check them out and uh, if you'd like to drop us a line, please do so at blow the Mind at Discovery dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how Stuff works dot com Brought to you

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