Absurd Creature of the Week: 10-Foot Bobbit Worm

From Wired: 10-Foot Bobbit Worm is the Ocean’s Most Disturbing Predator.

This is Eunice aphroditois, also known as the bobbit worm, a mix between the Mongolian death worm, the Graboids from Tremors, the Bugs from Starship Troopers, and a rainbow — but it’s a really dangerous rainbow, like in Mario Kart. And it hunts in pretty much the most nightmarish way imaginable, digging itself into the sea floor, exposing a few inches of its body — which can grow to 10 feet long — and waiting.

Using five antennae, the bobbit worm senses passing prey, snapping down on them with supremely muscled mouth parts, called a pharynx. It does this with such speed and strength that it can split a fish in two. And that, quite frankly, would be a merciful exit. If you survive initially, you get to find out what it’s like to be yanked into the worm’s burrow and into untold nightmares.

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Bobbit worms can tuck themselves away among coral and decimate an aquarium, picking off fish one by one, which you can imagine is quite confusing for the owner, since contrary to the events in Finding Nemo, fish typically don’t just disappear. And they can even take the pros by surprise. When a public aquarium in England was having a problem with mysteriously maimed fish and even corals, they set out bait night after night, which disappeared, hooks and all. Staffers eventually had to dismantle the exhibit, finding a 4-foot bobbit worm named Barry (presumably they gave him this name — he probably hadn’t always gone by Barry).

Do read the article at Wired! :)

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