Name: Pig Butt Worm (Puga hairfin)
Where it lives: Central California (mainly around Monterey Bay) and Channel Islands
What it eats: Marine snow (organic material floating in the ocean)
why it‘marvelous: This hazelnut-sized worm is so strange that when scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) first collected it in 2001, researchers didn’t know how to classify it.
“I was immediately interested in this strange creature, which looked like a pig’s butt on one side and Mick Jagger’s lips on the other. It was a creature that had grown to ten times its normal size. larvae or something new? Karen Osborn, a research zoologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and an adjunct staff scientist at MBARI, told LiveScience via email.
Meet the pig-butt worm 🐷🪱 When our team (including @OsbornLab ) first discovered the unusual pig-butt worm (Chaetopterus pugaporcinus) half a mile below the ocean’s surface, they were hard-pressed to determine what to do with this curious creature Classification. pic.twitter.com/7fN9xDoHYmFebruary 29, 2024
Osborne was given a small jar labeled “Mysterious Spot” and asked to figure out what it was.The species is Officially described in 2007 Eight individuals were collected from the mesopelagic zone of Monterey Bay, California, an area between 650 and 3,300 feet (200 and 1,000 meters) above sea level.
related: Skeleton Panda Ascidian – a strange little creature that looks like a red panda dressed up for Halloween
The puzzling creature looks like an oversized larva of a caterpillar, a type of bristle worm, and DNA sequencing confirmed it belongs to this family.
“Trichopterans are parchment worms, so called because they make papery tubes on the ocean floor,” Osborne said. But unlike their tube-like cousins, which are free-swimming only in their larval stage, this worm uses Its expanded midsection gains buoyancy and floats in the ocean.
The researchers believe the pig butt worms collected were adults, but they are not entirely sure because the specimens also showed some characteristics of larvae. They lack any obvious sexual organs, suggesting they are in a young stage of life, but they are 5 to 10 times larger than any other known Trichoptera larvae. When they were placed in a tank where they could settle on bottom sediment, they remained floating around, indicating that they did not need this habitat at any stage of their life.
This leads researchers to believe that pig-butt worms are making an “evolutionary leap”, abandoning the seafloor and living a nomadic lifestyle in bodies of water.
Transporting live samples back to the research vessel allows scientists to learn more about this strange little creature. For example, its body emits blue light and produces green bioluminescent slime, perhaps to deter predators.
Pig-butt worms eat marine snow—tiny particles of dead animals, feces, and other organic matter. According to the MBARI website, when “snow” falls to the ocean floor, the worms “spit out a snot net” to catch it.
The strange blobs were discovered by remotely piloted aircraft pilots and were named pig-butt worms. When exploring the deep ocean for long periods of time, “the conversation can get a little colorful, especially when you’re looking for something that looks like the back end of a pig,” Osborne said.
#Mysterious #blob #deep #sea #pig #butt #bulging #belly
Image Source : www.livescience.com