Tongue-eating bug found in fish:
The 3.5cm creature had grabbed onto the fish’s tongue and slowly ate away at it until only a stub was left.
It then latched onto the stub and became the fish’s “replacement tongue”.
It’s that last part that weirds me out. As the Tree of Life website puts it:
The tongue-eating isopod causes degeneration of the tongue of its host fish…and it then attaches to the remaining tongue stub and floor of the fish’s mouth by hook-like pereopods. In this position the isopod superficially resembles its host’s missing tongue. Brusca & Gilligan (1983) hypothesize that these isopods serve as a mechanical replacement for the fish’s tongue and represent the first known case in animals of functional replacement of a host structure by a parasite.
And then there’s this: Parasites brainwash grasshoppers into death dive:
A parasitic worm that makes the grasshopper it invades jump into water and commit suicide does so by chemically influencing its brain, a study of the insects’ proteins reveal.
So that old science-fiction chestnut about parasites taking over the human body and directly influencing behavior may not be all that far-fetched after all.
We live in a very strange world.