Well, if it’s 4 April, it must be… yes, of course: the second anniversary of the publication of a paper which told us much more about the branched annelid Ramisyllis multicaudata and its many, many arseholes than we knew before.
A branched annelid, you see, is a marine worm that (in this case, at least) lives inside sea sponges, has one head, and branches repeatedly, with each branch having an anus — giving rise to such headlines as:
There will now be a short interlude in which we all sing the words “the worm with a hundred bums” to the tune of Bobby Vee’s 1962 hit, The Night Has a Thousand Eyes.
Intrepid scientists Guillermo Ponz-Segrelles, Christopher Glasby, Conrad Helm, Patrick Beckers, Jörg Hammel, Rannyele Ribeiro, and Teresa Aguado examined the creatures more closely and discovered much more about them than was previously imagined.
It’s still true, for example, that
the whole body has an interconnected digestive tract with a high number of ani, one per each posterior end
…but there may be far more than 100 of those posterior ends.
It was first described in 1879 by William Carmichael M’Intosh, who said:
it would seem that […] the tail and the anus were more useful than the head.
And here, incidentally, is William Carmichael M’Intosh or McIntosh.
But I wonder what a fine, upstanding, and bountifully bearded Victorian would have thought of the creature’s sex life. When Ramisyllis feels the urge, you see, it does what any self-respecting creature with a whole lot of branches and sphincters would… Yes, of course: it converts the end of each branch into a set of genitals, each of which grows eyes and a brain and swims off to mate. And then dies. Obviously.
AREN’T YOU GLAD YOU’RE READING THIS?
You can find out more about this glorious creature and its habits in glorious couor and moving pictures, too:
And that’s not all. Last year, many of the same people, plus some others, published a new paper about a new annelid called Ramisyllis kingghidorahi — only the third of its kind, and named after a fabled enemy of Godzilla.
King Ghidorah is a branching fictitious animal that can regenerate its lost ends, so we thought this was an appropriate name for the new species of branching worm.
This marvellous, new, many-arsed worm also lives in sea sponges, but still hasn’t given us an answer to the most obvious question:
how do the worms manage to feed to maintain their huge bodies having just one tiny mouth in their single head?
