Meet Bobby
He is a bobbit worm. It looks like he has spread his tiny arms to offer you a hug. You should go ahead and give him a hug. If you want to die, that is. See Bobby doesn't really have arms. What you see are in fact its jaws. It uses them to catch his favourite food - little dumb unsuspecting fish. That's why you should never let anyone hug you if you're a fish. Especially not Bobby and his friends, no matter how much they try to sweet-talk you.
Here is Bobby giving a hug to his dinner:
Lovely little fella. The only thing which keeps me from shitting my pants just knowing that these things exist is their size - a typical bobbit worm is around 2.5cm wide. They do get pretty long though - up to 3 meters of worm can be buried in the sand beneath those jaws.
Bobbit worms are ambush hunters. They bury their long bodies underneath the sand on the sea floor and wait for their food to make the mistake of swimming too close to their jaws. At this point the worm lurches forward, clamping its jaws and dragging its prey beneath the sands.
The bobbit worm's scientific name is E. aphroditois, which sounds a bit like the Greek goddess Aphrodite. Why it's called that is beyond me - maybe because it looks like what Midjourney generates if you ask it to generate the exact opposite of Aphrodite. Just look at it:
On top of being fabulous in their iridescent rainbow shells, bobbit worms are cheeky little buggers and would sometimes find their way into private saltwater aquariums, usually as stowaways on rocks. One such worm was discovered in an aquarium in the UK after staff noticed that fish from the aquarium would randomly go missing during the night. When they emptied the aquarium, they found this buried underneath the sand:
It looks like it's saying hi to the camera. Cute little thing. Here is another photo:
When I found out that there are male and female bobbit worms I really hoped to find a video of two of them having sex but alas. It turns out that when she is ready to mate the female bobbit worm releases some pheromones in the water, attracting a male who slithers nearby and releases his sperm. In response the female releases her eggs and fertilization happens, resulting in tons of tiny nightmarish worms. Most of them get eaten, though, so very few bobbit worms make it to adulthood.
This sounds like a rather normal mating behaviour for sea-dwelling creatures. There are much crazier worms in the sea. One example is Megasyllis nipponica which would grow specialized segments at the end of their long bodies which would then detach and float to the surface. What happens next is an orgy made up solely of floating penises. To each their own I guess.
I was going to write some conclusion to this post about how we need to protect nature but I can’t find the words. It’s fascinating to me that life can take so many different forms. It’s really hard to imagine that me and you share a common ancestor with the bobbit worm - a few gene changes some billion years ago and we would be lying buried in the ocean floor waiting for a fish to swim by.
Well this was fascinating- thought about the Dune worms alot while reading it and wondered if this little guy was the inspiration or if the movie version was just plucked from someone’s imagination. I’m glad you posted,I love encountering interesting bits of trivia (especially nature related) much more than many opinion pieces on how to be a better you or do something better than you do lol! Thanks for sharing this knowledge.
Not sure about if it’s better for gathering fans but I like it. I’m also interested in wide variety of shit and at this stage can’t find a particular style to write in. Figure it’s a good way to hone the craft .