Fact Friday

The tongue-eating louse lives up to its name, or at least the females do. She enters a fish’s body through the gills and cuts off the circulation to the fish’s tongue. When the tongue falls off, she becomes the fish’s new tongue, feeding on the fish’s blood and/or mucus.

Cymothoa exigua By Marco Vinci [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0] 1 September 2013 via Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cymothoa_exigua_parassita_Lithognathus_mormyrus.JPG.

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Meet Renée Carlton, marine ecologist at the Khaled Bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation. She has studied the effects of climate change and ocean acidification on coral reefs all over the world—from the Florida Keys to islands in the South Pacific. She is especially interested in sharing marine science with communities around the world so they can effectively conserve their marine resources. She loves scuba diving, and her favorite ocean animal is a hermit crab.

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