Marine Life

Marine animals are incomparable to other things, in how they breathe, act, communicate, and overall live their lives.

Lucerna Parasitus

Lucerna Parasitus is Latin for lantern parasite, they  are ectoparasites meaning they live on the surface of their host rather then inside. It spends a small part of it’s life using it’s ten legs to glid through the twilight zone searching for a Lanternfish, when it spots one they swim up to it and uses their sharp teeth to latch on. They slowly eat the host till it dies then goes looking for another one. They keep doing this until they die they can live up too twelve years or the lanternfish gets eaten. Now a primary predator of the Lanternfish is the Emperor penguin, now when an Emperor penguin eats a Lanternfish with the parasite on it the parasite dies, but so does the penguin. Now we don’t exactly know why this happens but scientists think that Lucerna Parasitus carries H5N1 a deadly bird flu known to kill penguins, though there is no proof of it.