The short answer would be: “no.” Worms don’t have a tongue. Some people believe that worms have a tongue because certain worms do have something in their mouth that they can put out, something like a tongue. It’s called a “stiletto” and it looks more like a needle than a common tongue.
Plant-eating worms pierce the outside of the plant with their stylet. They then use the stylet as a straw to suck food from inside the plant; thus, as we see, the worm’s stylet is not really a tongue.
What exactly does a language do?
One of the important jobs of our tongue is to grind food when we are eating. Inside our tongue there is a set of muscles; These muscles allow our tongue to move food around our mouth and it moves it and crushes it against the hardest part at the top of our mouth.
Like us, worms also need to squash their food, but instead of using a tongue, worms have muscles in their guts that do this job.
Another important function of our language is to taste food. Our tongue is covered in small bumps. Inside those bumps are taste buds that can sense whether the food we are eating is sweet, salty, sour, or bitter. This helps us determine if a food can be dangerous for us.
Without a tongue, worms don’t have taste buds . But worms like earthworms can taste your food using special cells inside your mouth and also other cells that are in your skin. In addition to tasting, these cells also allow worms to smell. By sensing smells and tastes on the ground, worms can easily move to where they need to go to find food.
Thus, although worms do not have a tongue, they can use different parts of their body to supply some of the functionalities carried out by the human tongue.
Many species of worms
There are many thousands of different creatures that we call worms. Some of them are so small that we need a microscope to see them . Other worms are incredibly large.
An example of this is the boot lace worm ( Lineus longissimus ) . They are considered the longest animals in the world. We can find them in the northern hemisphere and their measurements reach up to 55 meters long. We could say that they can be as long as an Olympic swimming pool. These worms, which have a flabby and fragile brownish-colored body, live in the sea and are part of a group of marine worms with little-known chemistry. It wasn’t until 2018 that a study discovered a family of powerful protein neurotoxins in your mucosa.
“The most powerful of the new toxins identified produces effects in invertebrates similar to tetrodotoxin, a known toxin from puffer fish that causes paralysis. This makes it a potentially ideal insecticidal toxin”, commented Johan Rosengren, leader of the work that collected the Scientific Reports magazine. Not surprisingly, the bootlace worm’s neurotoxin can kill crabs, cockroaches, and other animals.
Referencia: Peptide ion channel toxins from the bootlace worm, the longest animal on Earth. Scientific Reports 8, Article number: 4596 (2018). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-22305-w
