When you think about a tongue’s job, tasting food or helping with speech probably comes to mind. In the animal kingdom, however, the tongue is often a highly specialized super-tool. From lightning-fast projectiles to built-in grooming combs, some animals use their tongues in ways that are truly bizarre and brilliant.
Perhaps one of the most famous tongues in nature belongs to the chameleon. It’s not just long; it’s a biological missile. A chameleon’s tongue can be up to twice the length of its body and can be launched at incredible speeds to catch unsuspecting insects. It can go from zero to 60 miles per hour in a hundredth of a second.
This isn’t just a simple muscle action. The tongue is propelled by a special accelerator muscle that contracts and loads energy into elastic tissues within the tongue’s structure. When the chameleon is ready to strike, this stored energy is released, shooting the tongue forward with immense force. The tip is not just sticky; it forms a small suction cup upon impact, ensuring the prey cannot escape.
Have you ever seen a snake flick its forked tongue in and out? It isn’t tasting the air in the way we taste food. It’s actually smelling. Snakes and many lizards use their tongues to collect scent particles from the air and ground.
When the tongue retracts into the mouth, the forked tips are inserted into a special sensory organ on the roof of the mouth called the Jacobson’s organ, or the vomeronasal organ. This organ analyzes the scent particles, giving the snake a detailed “scent map” of its surroundings. The forked nature of the tongue even allows it to detect which direction a smell is coming from, helping it track prey or find a mate with remarkable accuracy.
A woodpecker’s primary challenge isn’t just drilling into wood; it’s getting the insects out from deep inside the tree. To do this, it has an incredibly long and specialized tongue. A woodpecker’s tongue is so long that when it’s not in use, it wraps all the way around the back of its skull, sometimes even entering a nostril.
When the woodpecker is ready to feed, this long tongue extends far into the tunnels created by insects. The tip is hard and barbed, like a tiny spear, allowing it to impale grubs and larvae. To make it even more effective, the tongue is coated in sticky, glue-like saliva, ensuring that any insect it touches is pulled out of its hiding spot.
Reaching the tastiest leaves at the top of thorny acacia trees requires a special tool, and for the giraffe, that tool is its tongue. A giraffe’s tongue is prehensile, meaning it can be used to grasp and manipulate objects, much like a hand or an elephant’s trunk.
It can grow up to 20 inches long, giving the giraffe extra reach. You might also notice that its tongue is a dark, purplish-black color. This isn’t an accident. Scientists believe this dark coloration is due to a high concentration of melanin, which acts as a natural sunblock. Since giraffes spend so much of their day with their tongues out, this protects the sensitive organ from getting sunburned.
For the blue-tongued skink, a lizard native to Australia, the tongue is a life-saving defense mechanism. When threatened by a predator like a dingo or a large bird, the skink will open its mouth wide and display its incredibly bright, cobalt-blue tongue.
This sudden flash of vibrant color is often enough to startle a predator, causing it to hesitate for a crucial moment. This gives the slow-moving skink a chance to escape. The back of the skink’s tongue is even more intensely colored than the front, and it reflects UV light, making it particularly shocking to birds, which have excellent color vision.
Anyone who has ever been licked by a cat knows that its tongue feels like sandpaper. This rough texture comes from hundreds of tiny, backward-facing spines called papillae. These spines are made of keratin, the same material as our fingernails.
This design makes a cat’s tongue the perfect multi-tool. The papillae act as a natural comb, helping to detangle fur, remove dirt, and spread protective oils across the coat during grooming. When eating, these same spines are incredibly effective at scraping every last bit of meat from the bones of their prey.
The okapi, a relative of the giraffe found in the forests of Central Africa, has a tongue that is just as impressive. It is so long and flexible that the okapi is one of the few mammals in the world that can lick its own eyeballs and clean out its own ears. This remarkable ability helps keep its eyes clear of debris and its ears free of pests, serving as a built-in cleaning tool that is always on hand.
Which animal has the longest tongue in the world? The blue whale holds this record. Its tongue alone can weigh as much as an elephant, around 4 tons. It uses its massive tongue to push water out of its mouth through its baleen plates, trapping thousands of pounds of krill to eat.
Why is a frog’s tongue so sticky? A frog’s saliva is a “non-Newtonian fluid,” meaning it can change its viscosity. When the tongue is flying towards an insect, the saliva is thin and watery. The moment it makes impact, the force causes the saliva to become thick and sticky, like honey, trapping the bug. Then, as the frog pulls the bug into its mouth, the saliva becomes thin again, releasing the prey.
Do all animals have tongues? No, not all animals have tongues. For example, many insects, sea stars, and sea urchins do not have tongues. They have other specialized mouthparts designed for their specific diets and environments.