# Surinam Toad vs Saiga Antelope vs Tongue-Eating Louse: A Back Full of Babies, a Honking Nose-Trunk, and a Bug That Becomes Your Tongue > Three animals that have absolutely nothing in common except that all three made me say out loud, in an empty room, 'no thank you.' By someone who loves to compare irrelevant things. Daily matchup. ## Contestants ### Surinam Toad (Pipa pipa) Taxonomy: Amphibia > Anura > Pipidae > Pipa > The flattest, most unsettling devoted parent in the swamp. - COOL - Front toes: Tipped with 4 star-shaped sensors - WEIRD - Tadpole stage: Skipped - pops out fully formed - GROSS - Birth: ~100 toadlets erupt from holes in mom's back Photo: Dein Freund der Baum, CC BY-SA 3.0 (Wikimedia Commons) - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Surinam_toad_(DFdB).jpg ### Saiga Antelope (Saiga tatarica) Taxonomy: Mammalia > Artiodactyla > Bovidae > Saiga > An Ice Age relic running the steppe with a built-in air purifier on its face. - WEIRD - Nose: Floppy dust-filtering, air-warming trunk - COOL - Pedigree: Shared the planet with woolly mammoths - GROSS - 2015 die-off: ~200,000 dead in roughly 3 weeks Photo: Vladimir Yu. Arkhipov (Arkhivov), CC BY-SA 3.0 (Wikimedia Commons) - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Saiga_tatarica.jpg ### Tongue-Eating Louse (Cymothoa exigua) Taxonomy: Malacostraca > Isopoda > Cymothoidae > Cymothoa > A sea pillbug that applied for the job of 'your tongue' and got it. - COOL - Resume: Only known parasite to replace a host organ - WEIRD - Career: Born male, can switch to female - GROSS - Method: Drinks the tongue's blood until it withers and drops off Photo: Marco Vinci, CC BY-SA 3.0 (Wikimedia Commons) - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cymothoa_exigua_parassita_Lithognathus_mormyrus.JPG Some days I draw two animals out of the hat and they politely share a theme. Today the hat coughed up an aquatic toad that incubates its kids inside its own back, an Ice Age antelope with a saggy vacuum-cleaner nose, and a crustacean whose entire career is being a fish's tongue. No theme. No overlap. Just three creatures filed under 'evolution, what were you doing.' I judge animals on three things only - how cool they are, how weird they are, and how gross they are - and then I crown a winner with zero regard for fairness. Let's ruin everyone's afternoon together. ## The Surinam Toad: a parent you can see through the trypophobia The Surinam toad (Pipa pipa) is shaped like something that got stepped on and decided to keep going. It is fully aquatic, has tiny lidless eyes, and its front toes end in little star-shaped sensory lobes it uses to feel around the muck. Cool enough. Then you learn how it reproduces and your brain files a complaint. During breeding, the pair somersaults through the water for hours while the female releases around a hundred eggs. The male presses those eggs onto her back, where a thick layer of skin grows over them until they sit in honeycomb-like pockets. There is no tadpole stage. The young just develop in mom's back for three to four months and then erupt, fully formed half-inch toadlets, straight out of her skin. It is parental care. It is also the single most upsetting thing you will scroll past today, and I say that having looked up the other two. ## The Saiga Antelope: a mammoth-era survivor wearing a 1990s vacuum hose The saiga (Saiga tatarica) is a migratory steppe antelope with a huge, floppy, downward-pointing nose. It looks like a punchline, but the nose is a serious piece of equipment: the internal bones are wildly convoluted and the passages are lined with hairs, glands, and mucous tracts that filter dust and warm and moisten freezing air. It may double as a sounding chamber for rutting calls, so it is both an air filter and a kazoo. This thing shared the planet with woolly mammoths and is still out here honking. And then the gross, sad twist: in 2015, roughly 200,000 saigas - more than two thirds of the entire species - died in about three weeks. The cause was hemorrhagic septicemia from Pasteurella multocida bacteria that normally live harmlessly in the saigas' own bodies, triggered into a mass killing event by unusually warm, humid weather. The nose that survived the Ice Age got betrayed by its own tonsils. ## The Tongue-Eating Louse: HR called, you have been replaced Cymothoa exigua is not a louse and not an insect. It is an isopod, a crustacean, basically a sea pillbug with ambitions. It swims into a fish through the gills, latches onto the tongue, and uses its claws to sever the blood vessels until the tongue withers from blood loss and drops off. Then - and this is the part that earns it a place at this table - it attaches to the leftover stump and functions as the fish's new tongue, sometimes for years, while the fish goes on opening and closing its mouth around a living bug like nothing happened. Biologists describe it as the only known parasite that functionally replaces an organ of its host. It also tends to start life as a male and can switch to female. So it is gross, it is weird, and honestly the organ-replacement thing is genuinely, infuriatingly cool. I hate that I respect it. ## Winner: Tongue-Eating Louse The Surinam toad wins gross and the saiga wins tragic-magnificent, but the tongue-eating louse is the only contestant that scores on all three of my categories at once. Cool: it is the sole parasite known to replace a host's organ, full stop. Weird: it changes sex mid-career. Gross: it drinks your tongue until it falls off and then becomes your tongue. The toad gives me the shivers and the saiga breaks my heart, but only the louse made me close my mouth and think about my own tongue. Winner by unanimous decision of one guy on a blog. ## FAQ ### Does the fish die when the tongue-eating louse takes over? Usually not right away. That is the unsettling part - the fish can keep eating using the louse as a functional replacement tongue, sometimes for years. Heavy infestations can hurt the fish, but the basic arrangement is weirdly survivable. ### Why do baby Surinam toads come out of the mother's back? The eggs get embedded in pockets of skin on the female's back, where the young develop with no tadpole stage and emerge as fully formed toadlets after three to four months. Sealed into mom, they are far safer from predators than free-floating eggs would be. Safer for them. Worse for everyone looking at it. ### What actually killed 200,000 saiga antelopes in 2015? Hemorrhagic septicemia caused by Pasteurella multocida, a bacterium that normally lives harmlessly in the saigas. Unusually warm and humid weather during calving appears to have triggered the bacteria to turn lethal, wiping out more than two thirds of the species in roughly three weeks. ## Sources - Surinam toads, facts and photos: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/amphibians/facts/surinam-toad - Pipa pipa: https://animaldiversity.org/accounts/Pipa_pipa/ - Saiga antelope: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saiga_antelope - Mass Die-Off of Saiga Antelopes, Kazakhstan, 2015: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/25/6/18-0990_article - Cymothoa exigua: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymothoa_exigua - The tongue-eating louse does exactly what its name suggests: https://www.npr.org/2021/10/23/1048718433/the-tongue-eating-louse-does-exactly-what-its-name-suggests Tags: Amphibia, Mammalia, Malacostraca, Anura, Artiodactyla, Isopoda, totally-random, body-horror, parasite Canonical: https://lamalo.blog/surinam-toad-vs-saiga-antelope-vs-tongue-eating-louse