For this week’s pleasant Monday mental image, imagine a blood-sucking, worm-like creature slowly eating your tongue until it’s a dried-up stub.
Then, to make this image even more gruesome, imagine that the blood-sucking worm-like creature becomes your new tongue, replacing the tattered remnants of your mouth for the rest of your life, absorbing nutrients from your blood and eating your mucus for sustenance during spring allergy season.
I, too, shake in terror — especially when considering what spring allergy season is going to do to my nose and my Kleenex budget.
Of course, I am just as repulsed by the issue of this blood-sucking, worm-like tongue-eater creature.
Because such an animal does indeed exist.
The Cymotha exigua is technically a crustacean, which is the fancy word for crab or delicious lobster. This also makes it a cousin of the spiders. But, for a crustacean, the Cymotha more resembles a grotesque worm from the set of “Alien.” It also has a similarly frightening role to the famous monster.
On a slightly more comforting tone, the Cymotha doesn’t attack humans, but instead specifically targets the spotted rose snapper, a type of fish, by climbing through the snapper’s gills. Inside the snapper’s mouth, it sucks blood from the snapper’s tongue, causing the tongue to shrivel up and eventually disappear.
At that point, the Cymotha takes up its newly created job as the snapper’s tongue for the rest of its life, feeding off of the snapper’s blood and mucus.
To keep its host alive, the Cymotha literally acts as the snapper’s tongue, helping to ferry food down the snapper’s throat.
But the weirdness doesn’t stop there. A pair of Cymotha usually attaches to a host fish’s gills as juvenile males. Once the Cymotha grow older, the one that first reaches 10 mm in length transforms into a female, and the male and the (newly made) female Cymotha mate.
After mating, the female engages in the tongue-stealing process, while the male one detaches and floats away. The female later lays its eggs in the gills of the fish she parasitizes.
In other words, the Cymotha have sex in the fish’s gills before the female eats the fish’s tongue and becomes the substitute tongue. Talk about unconventional living styles.
The little buggers even became the subject of a lawsuit against a supermarket. The plaintiff had accidentally consumed a Cymotha while eating a red snapper and accused the supermarket for causing his subsequent food poisoning.
However, the case was dropped when later reports indicated that isopods like the Cymotha did not have any toxins capable of producing sickness.
The moral of this? The next time you take a bite of that fish, make sure there aren’t any weird buggy things inside. Because when you try to sue for weird buggies inside your food, you don’t stand a chance of winning any money. And what’s the point of going through a mentally scarring experience if you don’t get any money out of it?
Although we may shudder at the thought of Cymotha and be thankful that they don’t stalk humans, we aren’t completely free of evil parasite control — far from it.
In fact, half of the human population at this exact moment is infected by a form of mind-controlling bacteria.
T. gondii is a bacteria carried by domestic house cats, and can be (and has been) directly spread to humans. Scientists found that around 3 billion people in the world are infected by the bacteria, which increases human neuroticism and the probability of developing schizophrenia.
In other words, if you are moody, depressed, or lacking in anger-management skills, you may be part of the half of people with T. gondii. Either that, or you haven’t had enough coffee yet today. (Haha, remember coffee and osteoporosis? Please dig up my fascinating article from two weeks ago if you didn’t immediately pick up the reference.)
Next time someone complains about your bad mood, you can say, “It’s not me, it’s a bacteria thing,” and you would be perfectly accurate.
Kevin Hwang is a senior at Athens High School who is taking classes at Ohio University. What’s your favorite parasite? Email him at kh319910@ohiou.edu
