I was stoned at work the other day while hanging out with the electricians on set and talking about someone’s teeth, I don’t remember whose, but I started laughing and I said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if fish and birds had teeth that were like tiny human teeth?” I was just standing there giggling and imagining it and my friend Nick said, “Fish do have teeth.”

“I know,” I said.  “But they’re like those little grubby nodular things, they aren’t real bone teeth, and they aren’t shaped like human teeth.”  Nick said, “No, there are fish with human-shaped teeth.”

Anyone could have misheard this statement to mean teeth that were shaped like humans, or shaped like the teeth of humans, or any number of things but what I heard was, “No, there are fish with human-sheep teeth.”  “Sheep do have teeth,” I say.  Nick looks at me like I’m crazy and tells me, “No, they don’t have sheep teeth, they have teeth like humans.”  I still think he’s talking about sheep but I get called away to do actual work and run off.

About an hour later I start searching, “sheep teeth,” on my phone.  I found out that not only do sheep have teeth (I knew it!), but that they only have them on the bottom…and they do look like human teeth.  So I text this picture to Nick and I type in, “SHEEP DO HAVE TEETH!”

He replies, “I know they do! I said a sheepshead fish has teeth!”  So I do an image search for sheepshead fish and I find this:

Okay, so this is what the fish looks like, but you can’t see any teeth in this photo so I look further and find this one:

and this one:

and this one:

The next photo I stumbled upon made me totally freak the fuck out.  After seeing it, please read below to see an answer to your response which is probably, “UGHHHHH WHAT THE FUCK IS IT?!”

Well, his name is Todd and he looks super fucking delighted to arrive to the surface of the water and find that the paparazzi are already there! This is a Cymothoa exigua (tongue-eating louse).  That’s right, TONGUE-EATING LOUSE.  These motherfuckers are insane, they enter a fish through the gills and attach themselves to the base of it’s tongue. Then they use tiny little claws to suck blood out of the tongue until it atrophies and then the louse crawls up and eventually settles itself in place of the tongue. Apparently, the fish can then use the parasite as it would it’s normal tongue.  The Cymothoa exigua is the only known parasite that can functionally replace a host’s organ. WHAT THE FUCK?  Stoned learning.