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For starters, you need to know that a fish tongue is not like a human tongue. Our tongues are flexible, muscular, and magnificently mobile; they help us speak, suck, swallow, whistle, lick, taste, and tease our friends. Fish tongues—properly called basihyals—don’t do a lot of those things. They are, in their most basic form, just flat stubs of bone, perhaps topped with a scant pad of soft tissue, that protrude from the base of the mouth. They help fish shuttle food down and push water through gills, and don’t do a ton else. |
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But like a human tongue, the fish tongue does offer a highly accessible strip of blood-rich meat, parked in an oft-opened hole in the head—excellent bait for a parasite. Some eons ago, a few pillbug-like crustaceans called isopods happened upon this revelation. They became teeny terrors known as tongue biters, and several have since gained a reputation for nomming away at lingual appendages until little to none of the soft tissue is left. Their host’s mutilated mouth becomes their forever home, to the detriment of fish and to the shock of many of the humans who stumble upon them. |
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