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Bizarre Bone-eating Worms Inhabit Whale Falls
Chuck1318 writes "MSNBC reports the discovery of a species of bone-eating worms that live on whale carcasses on the sea floor. The female worm grows "roots" into the whale bones, which contain bacteria that help the worm digest fats from the bones. The tiny males live inside the female, sometimes over a hundred inside a single female. Whale falls provide important oases of nourishment on the sea floor, somewhat analogous to the communities of life around hydrothermal vents."
enuf said.
Your bone's got a little machine.
"bizarre bone-eating women"?
I know I took a double take when I was like:
"That sounds like my ex-girlfriend. What's she doing on salshdot.rog?"
sometimes over a hundred inside a single female
.. Hey I've seen that movie!
There are pictures and a detailed article here
I wondere if these worms can actually live inside live whales, what about the potential for transmition to human carcasses.
These worms may lead to more cures for leukaemia and FOP (Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva) a rare genetic disorder in which muscle turns to bone
I always find this sort of discovery fascinating.
A little of it is the love of the gross and the nasty left over from my boyhood (when I'd bring home toads and so on). Clearly some of the scientists are driven by the same thing -- the first scientists to see these worms in '95 (well, the tubes, w/o the worms in them) named them "green snot worms".
The other half is just a basic awe of the incredible diversity of life, and how little we still know about what's out there, and how it works. This is as close as I come to religious feeling. Truth is stranger than even the crazy fictions we make up to scare ourselves at night... I mean, sheesh -- the male worms live in scores *inside* the female, and never eat anything but the nutrients that came in the egg they were hatched in! They're little more than crude sperm factories. And the females survive by growing roots into dead whalebone -- which they can't digest themselves, but their roots are covered in bacteria which can digest it... and the bacteria gets oxygen from the funky hemoglobin-red tassel thing she has on top.
If creatures like this showed up in a movie it'd flop -- we'd all think it was too far-fetched. Cool.
...discovering one stage of the new worm does not describe its lifecycle.
They have some idea of its lifecycle, though obviously they're just getting started learning about the thing.
The current understanding is that when the eggs hatch, if the resulting worm lands on exposed whale bone, it grows into a female (about the size of your index finger). If it lands on a female worm, it stays tiny and becomes a male, living permanently inside the female and basically just producing sperm. If it lands anywhere else, it eventually dies.
Full fathom five thy Father lies,
Of his bones are Corrall made:
Those are pearles that were his eies,
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a Sea-change
Into something rich & strange
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
I heard about these worms via a segment on All Things Considered Friday. The authors of this new study were fun to hear.
Oh, I don't know. The description of hagfish streaming out of a corpse in Martin Cruz Smith's "Polar Star" is pretty interesting, too.