by Matthew Cobb
If they could live-stream this, it would probably outdo the Newcastle puddle, which eventually garnered over 500,000 viewers today. (Don’t know what I’m talking about? This might explain. It was actually quite fun before the lilos and surfboards turned up and Pizza Hut delivered a pizza to the puddle and everything got a bit meta (ALL THAT IS TRUE)).
The video shows a 2 metre long Lineus longissimus ribbon worm (aka the bootlace worm) snarfing up four dead polychaetes, one after another. The worms were all fished out of a fjord near Bergen, in Norway. The music is pretty irritating, but there’s no commentary so you can turn the sound off.
The Smithsonian has a page with “14 fun facts about ribbon worms”. Here are some of them [JAC: emphasis mine]:
With more than 1,000 species of ribbon worms (phylum Nemertea), most found in the ocean, there is a huge range of sizes and lifestyles among the various types. A defining characteristic of ribbon worms is the presence of a proboscis—a unique muscular structure inside the worm’s body. When attacking prey, they compress their bodies to push out the proboscis like the finger of a latex glove turned inside-out.
The largest species of ribbon worm is the bootlace worm, Lineus longissimus, which can be found writhing among rocks in the waters of the North Sea. Not only is it the largest nemertean, but it may also be the longest animal on the planet! Uncertainty remains because these stretchy worms are difficult to accurately measure, but they have been found at lengths of over 30 meters (98 feet) and are believed to even grow as long as 60 meters (197 feet)—longer than the blue whale! Despite their length they are less than an inch around.
Some ribbon worms sneak up on their prey, lying in wait buried in the sandy seafloor. One species of worm will pop up from its home in the sand when a fiddler crab walks over. The worm will cover the prey with toxic slime from its proboscis, paralyzing the crab so the ribbon worm can slide into a crack in the shell and eat the crab from the inside out.
Not all ribbon worms are predators – some are parasites. One genus of ribbon worms, Carcinonemertes, lives as a parasite on crabs, eating the crab’s eggs and any animals that it can find from the confines of its host.
Via Christopher Mah aka @echinoblog
Thankful it isn’t 3 ft around, ugh.
But then we’d have Spice.
If only we could find ribbon worm with a taste for republicans…
Odd, but I thought they were republicans…
This isn’t on topic, and I do apologize, but the links in the “About Jerry Coyne” section seem to be dead. Is it just me having trouble accessing them?
Yep – I tried as well & they are unable to connect…
It seems to work for everyone else, so I don’t think it’s a problem on my end.
Just tried them again and they are okay. Thanks.
Om-nom-nom-nom-nom…
Better:
Om–nom-nom-nom-nom———————————————————–
[Sigh. No edit facilities. :-/]
I have not seen them eat before, but I used to find these sorts of things (or something very much like them) in tide pools.
Very interesting. Also, that is the most annoying music I have ever heard. I only listed to the first 15 second and last 15 seconds and hated it.
Pending a determination from our Classics people, that means something like “crab (cancer-) killer (m[u]erta))”?
“Necrophagy” – sounds disgusting, and I expect is supposed to, but when did any of us last eat a piece of live chicken or cow?
According to Rohde’s Marine Parasitology, a Didymozoid trematode that lives in the sunfish, Mola mola, can reach 12m, but it is thin. I seem to recall that there are long parasite in the urinary tracts of whales…
A 60 meter worm? Surely, that’s a stretch!
I am NOT going to click on the ‘run’ button for the video. I want to be able to go to sleep tonight.
Aside from giant centipedes, long wriggly worms are my personal horror. “Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs Upon the slimy sea.”
8-(
cr
Sweet vid! Jeez, imagine those polychaete bristles going down your gullet…yikes!