This Alien-like Worm Will Freak You Out!

A few days ago I stumbled upon this freaky video:

Here's a quick recap of my thoughts as I watched it: 

Hmmm, that's a weird worm, what could it be? Yes, good idea brother, when in doubt, poke it with a stick! No no,  what the fuck is that white goo? Why is it moving and expanding? Quick, kill it! Kill it with fire!

To be honest I was really baffled by the video. I have seen some weird stuff, but I had no idea what that could be..

My guesses were:

1. The worm-thing was some kind of nudibranch taken out of the sea or something
2. The white thing was some short of parasite or something that popped out because..reasons

So next thing I did was read the description of the video and ask the almighty google for more information and let me tell you... I was totally wrong in all except maybe for the "sea" part....

So...

What Is This Thing?

Apparently, the creature in the video is a ribbon worm. Ribbon worms belong to a group of poorly understood invertebrate animals called "Nemertea". The vast majority of them are marine, out of the more than 1,4000 known species only a handful are terrestrial!

Most ribbon worms are pretty small, less than 20 cm long although there are some species that get quite big. Really, really, really big! For example, Lineus longissimus  is one of the longest animals in the world and can grow to be more than 50 m long, although most individuals are between 5 to 15 m. Quite impressive !

Lineus longissimus (credit)

As for the one shown in the video, I couldn't find the exact species it belongs to. Who knows, maybe it is an undescribed species. If it's not, my guess is only a handful of people can actually recognize it. 

Chances are that it is a marine species that maybe got washed out. Or maybe the guy is a fisherman and it got hauled up one way or the other.

By the way, I forgot to mention that ribbon worms are also known as  proboscis worms. Which brings us to the second question...

What is this white goo?

 The white thing that comes out of the worm is the proboscis, a long appendage that these worms shoot out of their mouth. The proboscis is usually toxic in nature and does two things. It paralyzes and entangles the prey, before its all sucked back in for consumption. Here's a more scientific description of the organ, stolen from wikipedia:

The proboscis is an infolding of the body wall, and sits in the rhynchocoel when inactive. When muscles in the wall of the rhynchocoel compress the fluid in the rhynchocoel, the pressure makes the proboscis jump inside-out to attack the animal's prey along a canal called the rhynchodeum and through an orifice, the proboscis pore. The proboscis has a muscle which attaches to the back of the rhynchocoel, and which can stretch up to 30 times its inactive length and then retract the proboscis.[1]

That's one heck of a feeding mechanism, don't you think?

In case you didn't get it, the proboscis is supposed to go back inside the creature, which didn't happen in the video. Loosing the proboscis doesn't result in immediate death but the organ can't be regenerated. So, without the proboscis a ribbon worm is doomed to death from starvation! 

Here are two more videos showing ribbon worms shooting out their proboscis! 

 

So this is it pretty much for today. I hope you got as excited as me by this bizarre creature! Don't forget to check out the links in the references if you want to learn more!

 References & Further Reading

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemertea
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lineus_longissimus
• http://eol.org/pages/586802/details

 My dear readers, thank you for reading today's article. Hopefully, you found it interesting enough to follow me, @trumpman. You may also want to check my strange animal series where you get to discover some of the world's weirdest animals!  Here are the last 3 weirdos of the series: 

1. Meet the Platypus a Very Strange Mammal That Lays Eggs!
2. Notaden bennettii: The Super Cute Holy Cross Frog
3. Scientists Baffled by Weird Jelly Blob. Find Out How You Can Help Them!

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