Attention! This block post contain very disgusting pics!
Are you SURE?
Ok.
When you think of a parasite, what will you think of?
Well, let’s google.
The first two pictures are here:
These little things are disgusting, intimidating, but normal: liner body shape, look just like a normal worm but attach a creature in a very disgusting way. However, if you rate the horrifying level for these pictures for a scale of 5 out of 10, the third picture will be 500. Here it is.
The name of this nightmare creature is named Cymothoa exigua, ad known as tongue-eating louse. First time seeing this was on a British newspaper, daily mail. The journalist give the title “alien parasite”, claimed that it was first found in Spain and named “Betty” after the person who found it(but seriously who will name this creature after their own name?!). After I done some research, I figure this is not a new species, but a is a parasitic crustacean of the family Cymothoidae. It was known that they will climb in to fishes’ mouth, settle on their tongue, drain as much blood as they can until the tongue was necrotized. Then, they will eat the tongue and attach their tail to the fish, replace the tongue with their own body and transform from parasitic to symbiosis, share the food with the fish, also decrease it’s life expectancy.
http://www.scielo.br/pdf/rbzool/v24n1/32.pdf
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2109278/In-Spain-hear-scream-Mediterranean-fish-threat-gruesome-Alien-parasite-eats-tongues-lives-mouths.html#ixzz1oHTUXLOX