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"Flamboyant" New Squid Worm Surprises, Delights Experts

S

SaturnVengeance

Lieutenant
This think looks wicked sick.

census-marine-life-best-pictures-41_27022_600x450.jpg


Scanning the depths off the Philippines in 2007, an undersea robot beamed back video of a worm—or was it a squid, or a worm eating a squid?—with spiraling appendages, iridescent "oars," and a feathery "nose."

"When the image came onto the screen, everyone said, Oh my gosh, what's that?" recalled marine zoologist Laurence Madin of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

Thanks to a new study co-authored by Madin, we now have the answer. The animal—as suspected—turned out to be a bizarrely bedecked marine worm totally new to science. (See marine-worm pictures.)

The paper, published Tuesday in the journal Biology Letters, describes the new species at length for the first time and officially christens the creature Teuthidodrilus samae, or "squid worm of the Sama"—the Sama being a culture with ties to Philippine islands not far from the discovery site.

Read more: http://bit.ly/e8l3aZ
Click to expand...
 
Thanks for all these scientific news stories. They're cheering me out of tonight's bitter mood quite effectively. :) That is indeed an impressive worm.
 
I was slightly disappointed to find out that it was only 4 inches long i.e. smaller than it is shown in the photo.

Still interesting however.
 
I took an invertebrate zoology class in grad school, so I feel pretty good that I identified this guy in the photo as a marine polychaete worm*.

If you look at the body of the worm, you'll see that it is divided up into segments, and each segment has a little "flap" on each side (well, in this photo's orientation, along the top and bottom of each segment). Coming out of each flap is a fan-like cluster of bristles called chaetae, which in this little beast show up as those blue "oars", and they are used for locomotion. If you go to Youtube and type in the species name 'Teuthidodrilus samae', there is a cool video clip of it swimming.

If you want to read more, do a Google search or go to Wikipedia searching for "Polychaete" or "Polychaete worm", and you'll get more info and some photos of some of this guy's cousins. "Pompeii Worms", those worms with the bright red plumes of gills that that live in paper-thin tubes along the deep sea hydrothermal vents are also polychaetes.

Thank you for sharing that great photo and article, SaturnVengeance!


* The article states that this is a new genus and species, but it does share the established class "Polychaeta' with other worms, and being an annelid (Phylum Annelida: 'ringed' or 'segmented' worms), it it even is a distant relative to the earthworms burrowing through our back yards.
 
^^ I fear that this is just one of Dread Cthulhu's sperm.
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Thanks for this Post, SaturnVengeance; I'm always on the lookout for new animal discoveries. :bolian:
 
The bad news is that they have litters of 30 billion. The good news is that they have a gestation period of 270 billion years.
 
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