BEFORE you press play on that video (we’re sure some of you just went for it anyway) put down whatever it is you’re eating.
This is a ribbon worm called a Gorgonorhynchus. When it senses nearby prey it launches what looks like a root out of its face. Anything caught in those flinchingly terrifying ‘roots’ get hauled into the worm’s belly.
These adorable little worms live in the ocean…
It’s summer.
Good luck out there.
Robotics design is continually making all those creepy robot-takeover concepts part of our future reality. Check this thing out. It’s a ‘robot’ that imitates the actions of a worm but has the uncanny creepy factor of a maggot when you continue to watch it move. As soon as someone attaches some kind of weird syringe-probe thing? We’re done.
From MIT:
Earthworms creep along the ground by alternately squeezing and stretching muscles along the length of their bodies, inching forward with each wave of contractions. Snails and sea cucumbers also use this mechanism, called peristalsis, to get around, and our own gastrointestinal tracts operate by a similar action, squeezing muscles along the esophagus to push food to the stomach.
Now researchers at MIT, Harvard University and Seoul National University have engineered a soft autonomous robot that moves via peristalsis, crawling across surfaces by contracting segments of its body, much like an earthworm. The robot, made almost entirely of soft materials, is remarkably resilient: Even when stepped upon or bludgeoned with a hammer, the robot is able to inch away, unscathed.
Watch it again….it’s creepy little self gets stepped on and hit with a hammer! And it KEEPS GOING!
Mount St. Helens erupted almost 32 years ago. The Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument area around the base of the volcano is monitored by the U.S. Forest-Service and its goal is to not interfere with the natural processes taking place in the area.
As a result the area that is in the middle of the blast zone looks like something out of the last few minutes of Kingdom of the Spiders when William Shatner’s characters awakes in the morning to find the entire town and beyond covered in layers of webs.
Billions of tent caterpillars have suddenly covered practically every tree, bush and branch along the Hummocks Trail near Coldwater lake in Toutle Valley, Washington.
An extreme population explosion has taken place this year and these things are EVERYWHERE!
Last year, the tent caterpillar population began to show signs of growing exponentially. While many insect species go through this whole boom-and-bust cycle from time-to-time, this year literally looks like the scene from some horror film.
Alder trees, a species of tree capable of growing in an environment where the original forest floor is now covered by over 100 feet of volcanic rock, look like they’re actually pulsating due to the thick masses of caterpillars swarming them for food.
Foresty professionals are not interested in interfering with the natural processes at work and are letting this strange new evolution of the area simply run its course.
Once the caterpillars break from their coccoons the sky will swarm with millions of cream-grey moths which will, in turn, feed local species of bats that’ve been struggling to find food sources as rich as this.
Until then the entire area is a pulsating, undulating mass of inch-long, furrry caterpillars that, while they’re causing no harm, are a site that would freak anyone out if they stumbled upon it in the woods.
[Katu.com]
It’s like Ridley Scott had a hand in designing worms.
Those dainty little flower-like objects in the picture above are anything but dainty little flower-like objects.
Those things are worms of the Osedax (Latin for “bone devourer”) family of wormy beings.
Those things aren’t just resting there either…they’re actually throwing up acid and trying to get at the marrow inside the bone!
Species of osedax have apparently been around forever but only discovered by researchers as recently as 2002 at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California.
What’s putting them back on everyone’s radar are new findings about something that’s been bugging researchers since they were discovered…How does a creature with no mouth attach, bore and extract nutrients from something as hard bone?
A fresh look at the osedax has revealed something ripe for a low-budget science-fiction film.
Using a technique not unlike Jeff Goldblum’s ‘BrundleFly’ vomit-drop from the film The Fly, the worms basically attach to the bones using root-like appendages which secrete a green, acidic enzyme on to the bone that then breaks down the tissue so that the worm can continue burrowing and extracting the nutrients it needs.
Since their discovery in 2002, seventeen species of the worm have been found off the coasts of California, Japan and Sweden. With this new research, a three million year-old whale fossil collecting dust in Italy has been given a second look and it appears that the burrowing pattern on those bones are a match for the burrowing patterns of the osedax worms.
[BBC]
U.S. and Filipino scientists have announced the discovery of a new species Teuthidodrilus samae, which they immediately named “squidworm.” It is a flat, eyeless, free-swimming worm with up to ten squid-like appendages. It also has twenty five or more pairs of translucent fins arranged on its sides for swimming. The creatures were found between 6,650 and 9,550 feet below the surface of the ocean in the Celebes Sea between Indonesia and The Philippines.That having been noted, the squidworm differs dramatically from all known worms in that it is a polychaete — a type of bristly annelid that is generally found in marine environments — and seems to be a missing link between benthic polychaetes living on the seafloor and pelagic ones dwelling much further up.