They lack suckers, having instead a muscular organ called a "rhynchus" at the front end which they use to attach to their hosts.

They are parasites of fish from freshwater, marine, and brackish water habitat types.

By what Manter calls a "curious circumstance", horns are also suggested by the long tentacles of adult worms.

In their intermediate hosts, which include mollusks and at least one amphibian, they occur as asexually reproducing stages.

The spermatozoa of adult bucephalids has been studied by transmission electron microscopy in several species belonging to the Bucephalinae and Prosorhynchinae, but, in the absence of data on the three other subfamilies, these studies could not provide information on the phylogenetic relationships within the family.