Sunday, 5 January 2020

Giant Worms!



Giant worm burrows beneath the sand and into your nightmares
The sea-bound creepy crawly above definitely falls in the latter category.
Taken by diver Jules Casey, the video shows a long spoon worm burrowing itself into the ocean sediment.In her Instagram post, Casey says this is a type of spoon worm called Ikeda taenioides. She filmed it during a night dive near the Blairgowrie Pier in Australia.This type of spoon worm, the largest in the world, is native to the northern Pacific Ocean.It can grow to lengths of over 8 feet. While hard to measure exactly, the spoon worm in the video appears even longer.Ikeda taenioides buries itself about 30 inches into the sand, while keeping its proboscis or nose poking out of the sediment for feeding.
See video here :

Spoon Worms are mainly  deposit feeders, collecting detritus from the sea floor. Fossils of these worms are seldom found and the earliest known fossil specimen is from the Upper Carboniferous. However, U-shaped burrow fossils that could be Echiuran have been found dating back to the Cambrian Era. They  don’t  have any eyes or other sense organs, but instead the proboscis is presumed to have a tactile sensory function. Echiurans are exclusively marine and the majority of species live in the Atlantic Ocean.Luckily you are unlikely to meet one in everyday life.A living cryptid.

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