(ORDO NEWS) — Don Marks, a 27-year-old Cape Town resident, caught a fish with a terrible parasite on a fishing trip. Instead of a tongue, she had a living monster in her mouth. He could not even imagine that the stories about the language woodlice were real until he himself witnessed this terrible sight.
Reported by the Daily Mail.
Don Marx pulled a carpenter’s fish weighing 2.7 kg out of the water. When he tried to unhook the hook from her mouth, he was seriously scared. Instead of a tongue, there was a parasite in the fish’s mouth. It turned out to be a lingual wood lice, when it gets into the oral cavity, it eats the tongue and is attached instead of it. Since fish are cold-blooded creatures, they do not feel pain and torment at this moment, but continue to live on.
The guy took some pictures of this eerie sight. Researchers who looked at them said that previously this type of parasite was not captured in the photo. Nico Smith, the professor who studied the images, said that only previously, researchers did not attach much importance to parasites such as woodlice. By the way, the specimen in the photo feeds exclusively on the tongues of fish-dens. Today, scientists have identified 280 species of woodlice. They will never settle in fish, where another parasite already lives.
Woodlice clings with claws to the tongue of the fish, injures blood vessels with its claws and begins to feed on blood. Gradually, the tongue dies off, and the parasite increases in size and begins to perform the functions of an organ. When the host fish dies, the parasite dies with it.
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