Ep 165 Fish Tongue Parasite: Parasite Appreciation Hour

This Podcast Will Kill You

Exactly Right and iHeartPodcasts

Health & Fitness, Science

4.8 • 17.1K Ratings

🗓️ 11 February 2025

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Okay everyone, think about your tongue. Maybe move it around a bit, check in with it, consider what it means to you. Now imagine that your tongue suddenly shriveled up and fell off and that in its place is a tongue-sized isopod aka rollie pollie aka pillbug. Just there, hanging out, forever. How are you feeling? Horrified? Disgusted? Hey, we get it. But at least you’ll never be alone again. Believe it or not, this is not some bad creative writing exercise. This is a very real parasite. In fact, it’s not just one but a whole group of them. Fortunately for us humans, these tongue-replacing isopods don’t target mammals but rather various fish species (unfortunately for the fish). And in this week’s episode, we’re getting up close and personal with these bizarre (and dare we say cute?) organ-replacing parasites. If you’re wondering why on earth you should care about a niche parasite like this one or why it might be a bad idea to get rid of all of earth’s parasites, then we warmly invite you to sit back, relax, and enjoy this parasite appreciation hour.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is exactly right.
0:06.0	My name is Dr. Jack Abrams.
0:08.0	I'm a physician at the Atlantic Hospital in Maryland.
0:11.0	I'm making this video in the hope that I will be able to watch it at some point in the future,
0:16.0	and I'm going to show the world what happened here.
0:19.0	I locked myself in the ICU. The CDC stopped taking my
0:22.9	phone calls. Called FEMA, help hasn't arrived. I think I now know what is killing people. We were looking
0:30.4	for some kind of virus, some kind of viral outbreak. I now know this is not a virus. This is an organism. It is an organism that has somehow infiltrated people's bodies.
0:42.3	The blistering, that's a symptom. That is what threw us off. It is the isopod. It's eating their organs.
0:50.3	It's literally eating them from the inside. It is eating their intestines. It is eating their liver.
0:56.0	It goes for the kidneys, lungs, tissue.
0:58.0	This is a rapidly growing, accelerating organism.
1:01.0	How it's growing this fast, I have no idea.
1:04.0	I noticed this rash about 45 minutes ago.
1:08.0	And I'm going to continue to take the camera,
1:10.0	and I'm going to document everything that the camera, and I'm going to document
1:11.0	everything that I see here. If you find this tape, just please get it out.
1:30.3	Music The The Erin. Erin. Erin, it was so hard not to laugh out loud.
2:06.9	I loved your rendition of it.
2:11.1	Clearly, I am not an actor, but I did the best I could.
2:14.7	I disagree.
2:15.3	I disagree based on that.
	...

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