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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."
As a parasite on a live animal, the worms would have to contend with the immune system of the whale. Also, from the article, the normal appearance would have only a portion of the worm exposed including its gills. Since the whales bones are not normally exposed....
Also, these are large enough to be seen, evidently without magnification. See the photo in the article. Evidently these had not been noticed in centuries of whaling.
Still, discovering one stage of the new worm does not describe its lifecycle. Perhaps it is parasitic at another stage.
All my previous sigs now look like this one, I wish they were permanetly recorded when used.
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.
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.