Awesome find! very interesting.

Maybe these are the early traces of the a species that will take our place after we are gone. That is of course unless you believe the "old watching and judging invisible man in clouds" story.

this is just a mile from me, that drain goes right round nottingham. interesting to know those little fellas live in there, i might go look for em by mushing some old dog poo up too...

I guess that means we won't be seeing Highlander: Worms anytime soon.

Perhaps we were designed/have evolved to die because we are also so skilled at wreaking havoc on the natural world...

Also, We cut these in two in my intro biology class, and mine did die.... plenarians, same worms, cut it in half, didn't grow back like everyone else's. stupid ass jerk worm went and died on me.

Perhaps we were designed/have evolved to die because we are also so skilled at wreaking havoc on the natural world...

I know you are just joking, but it brings up a fault that many who don't believe in evolution have...

They tend to class humans as the be all and end all of everything (probably because they are taught we're made in God's image), and so if anything else has evolved to do or have something that we would like to be able to do/to have they figure that's proof that evolution isn't real because otherwise we'd have these cool things.

We never 'evolved to die', our evolution path, along with 99.9999999(a lot of 9s) of the rest of the creatures on this earth never came up with this handy little trait.

These worms, being that they're very simple, and when not regenerating, probably had very short lifespans, meant that they quickly ran through many iterations of mutations and the like. Now, for something like them, who are pretty low on the food chain, the ability to recover from having part of you eaten or torn off, would be a huge boon, so those that developed the trait would have passed that along to many more, and they would have lived longer, so passed it on to more and more and more... as a trait that stops you dying, you can see how it would easily become the dominant, and then the only trait in your species.

Our turnover of generations is much slower than theirs, we are spread out a lot more than them, we are much more complicated than them...