This came up in a game show (they were asking about a bird). All the birds I’ve seen have tongues. Reptiles flick their tongues. Mamuals have them.
Are there any exceptions? Do all creatures **except **fish have tongues?
Do any use it for sexual pleasure except humans?
I know at least some fish have tongues, because I was once horrified by a picture of a parasite that actually replaces the tongue of a fish.
Pretty much any animal that eats through a mouth needs a tongue, except for those that don’t bite or chew, or just allow small particles into their mouths. I can think of sea anemones, worms, various gastropods. Not sure of insects and other arthropods.
Some fishes are mouth brooders. They carry eggs and young about in their mouth. I don’t know if they get off on it.
:rolleyes:
I totally forgot about insects. They are so tiny that I’ve never seen a mouth, much less a tongue. 
I don’t know if they have tongues or not.
You mean this cute little fella? 
Yeah, that’s the nasty little thing. Creepy.
That has to be photoshopped. It’s got human upper teeth! That’s not real? Is it?
It’s real. Previous thread.
The parasite is real. Fish have various types of teeth, although as an aquarium keeper, I have never seen any like that.
Does self-pleasure count…because dogs lick their balls all the time.
I’ve eaten many pounds of cod tongues in my lifetime, it’s the best part of the fish, and the only edible part that is rejected in the fish processing industries from the North Atlantic cod fishery. That, and the cheeks, which are good, too.l.
OK, congratulations, that picture actually got me to “eek”. There aren’t many things that can do that to me, especially not when I’m expecting them.
Yes I would agree the human teeth kind of give it away as photoshopped.
What do you mean by “creature”? I think that word is most usually taken to be synonymous with “animal”, in which case, there are many, many types of animals without tongues: amoebas, worms, molluscs, insects, arachnids, jellyfish, sponges…
(Some people do seem to use “animal” to mean mammal, but at least you do not seem to be making that mistake.)
Originally “creature” meant any created thing (created by God), so pretty much everything that exists in reality counted as a creature. That is still listed as word’s primary meaning by Merriam-Webster. In actual usage, the meaning seems later to have narrowed to just living things, and then just animals.
Are you using it to mean vertebrates?
[nitpick]Amoebas aren’t animals.[/nitpick]
On the other hand, I do believe the OP is correct to believe that many types of fish do not have tongues, and, I believe, even in those that have a tongue like structure in their mouth (including the one that gets eaten by the parasite) it is not technically correct to call it a tongue. According to the Yahoo Answer at the bottom of this page, it is correctly called a basihyal. (Yahoo Answers generally demand to be taken with a large pinch of salt, but in this case the answerer seems to be quoting something fairly authoritative.)
On the contrary, many amoebas are animals.
Animalia Kingdom should sum it up. Basically any animal, insect, fish, reptile etc.
