Human tongues are a tight mass of muscles, arteries, and nerves, coated with around 10,000 taste buds, but they aren’t the wildest in the animal kingdom. Some animals use tongues for the same things that we do, like tasting, digesting, and making noises, but many others don’t even have their tongues attached in the same place as a human’s. The base of one bird’s tongue is in its nostril, for example, and that’s not the weirdest part. What do the forks of a snake’s tongue do? How do frog tongues work? Find the answers — and the story behind a parasite that can replace anentire tongue — in these nine facts about tongues.
The human tongue has 8 muscles
Human tongues average just over 3 inches long, but each one packs in a whopping eight muscles — four that exist only in the tongue and four that connect to other body parts. Two longitudinal muscles shorten and widen the tongue, and curl it upward and downward. The transverse muscle elongates and narrows the tongue, and the vertical muscle flattens it. The extrinsic muscles — the genioglossus, styloglossus, hyoglossus, and palatoglossus — handle, among other things, sticking out your tongue, pulling it back in, curling it up and down, and helping you swallow.
Cat tongues covered with barbs
When a cat licks you, it feels like sandpaper. That’s because cat tongues are covered with little barbs called papillae, which are made of keratin — just like human fingernails. These barbs help cats groom themselves by working through knots and tangles in their fur, removing parasites, and spreading around beneficial oils. Big cats have the same barbed tongues; tigers use them to scrape fur and feathers off their prey, too.
Frogs catch prey heavier than body weight with tongues
Frogs can use their long tongues to catch bugs at dizzying speeds, thanks to saliva that functions as both a liquid and a solid, filling in all the crevices of the target and holding them for the return trip. In fact, frog tongues are so efficient that they can actually aim for even bigger prey, catching mice and small birds — up to 1.4 times the frog’s body weight — and dragging them back with a force 12 times greater than gravity. The whole process happens in 70 milliseconds, five times faster than a human can blink.
Tongue should rest on mouth’s roof
Bring your awareness to your tongue — if you haven’t already — without moving it. Despite the tongue usually being pictured as tucked into your bottom teeth, it’s probably touching the roof of your mouth. This is good tongue posture, and it helps support a wider palate that keeps your airways open. It also helps keep your tongue from interfering with the alignment of your teeth.
Snake tongues collect smell samples
Unlike many animals — including humans — snakes don’t taste things or make noises with their forked tongues. The function of these forks is related to smelling, albeit indirectly. When snakes stick out their tongues, they collect samples of chemicals in the air. After the tongue drops the samples inside the mouth, a different organ on the roof of the mouth does the actual smelling.
The forked shape means that snakes can evaluate their environment in three dimensions, and when they spread the forks out completely, they can check out an area wider than their heads. Once they find a trail made by prey or a possible mate, the forks help them determine more quickly if they’re getting off track — if one prong falls outside the trail, they can adjust quickly.
Giraffes have purplish prehensile tongues
Giraffes have unique tongues that are both colorful — they fall on a blue-purple-black spectrum — and wiggly. They’re prehensile, meaning that they’re capable of grasping, like a finger. They’re also around 18 inches long, covered with thick, protective saliva, and among the strongest in the animal kingdom. This helps them grab leaves high up in the trees (otherwise, what would be the point of those super-long necks?) and be precise when they’re seeking out food that’s tangled up in thorns.
So why are giraffe tongues purple? Scientists aren’t entirely sure, but it may provide some sun protection when they’re rooting around in the top of the tree canopy.
Woodpecker tongues wrap around their skulls
Woodpeckers use their bony tongues to bore deep into trees to find their prey — but their tongues extend far longer than their beaks, and sometimes even their entire heads. When they pull their tongues back in, they actually wrap them around the inside of their skulls. Like humans, they have a hyoid bone that supports the back of their tongue, but it’s tucked way up near their nostrils. When the woodpecker needs its tongue, the organ travels all the way from around the back of their skull and back out the bottom of the beak. The actual length of the tongue varies by species, but it can be up to a third of the bird’s body length.
Fish parasite masquerades as tongue
It’s a good thing that fish aren’t particularly squeamish (at least as far as we know), because they can be targeted by a pretty horrifying parasite that feeds off fish tongues … before taking their place in the fish’s mouth. After entering the fish through the gills, the parasite latches onto the tongue and begins drinking its blood. Once the tongue eventually falls off, the parasite moves in and takes the role of the fish’s tongue, feeding off the fish’s mucus instead. The good news is that this doesn’t kill the fish — it’s a functional tongue replacement — and the partnership can go on for years.
Chameleon tongues have suction cups
Like frogs, chameleons have long tongues that can snatch insects out of the air in a fraction of a second, but they function a little differently. At the end of each chameleon tongue is a ball of muscle that hits the prey and turns into a suction cup. Once it has its snack locked on, the chameleon snaps the tongue back into its mouth and crushes the prey with its jaws before swallowing. Chameleon tongues are quite formidable: They can stretch out to twice the length of a chameleon’s body and accelerate faster than a fighter jet, thanks to a system that combines a powerful muscle and a series of sheaths that function sort of like a stretched rubber band that propels the tongue into the air.
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