#Nemertea

[crevicedwelling]

realized I hadn’t fed my Geonemertes in two weeks, so I offered it an isopod. didn’t expect to see it strike, so the video isn’t the sharpest, but what a cool way of hunting!

the worm fires its sticky proboscis like a harpoon, presumably injecting venom at some point.

this is Geonemertes pelaensis, one of a scant few terrestrial examples of a mostly marine phylum (Nemertea). it’s an invasive species in the US and elsewhere, implicated in lowering counts of some soil arthropods.

it also has a very cute face.

[animalshowdown]

Phylum Round 1

Nemertea: Ribbon Worms. These simple organisms are mostly seafloor-dwelling, but some may live in freshwater or even on land. Most are predators of small invertebrates, but some are herbivorous or symbiotic with a host. Instead of crawling, Nemerteans secrete a thick mucus and use thousands of tiny hair-like cilia to glide across the slimy surface. Their most distinctive feature is their internal proboscis, which can be everted inside-out of their bodies and used to capture prey.

Ctenophora: Comb Jellies. The largest animal phylum to swim using hair-like cilia. Their cilia are arranged in rows, called combs or ctenes, down the length of their body. The cilia move in a wave-like pattern that generates colorful reflecting light shows. Almost all Ctenophores are predators of small plankton as they drift in the ocean. They inhabit a variety of marine habitats from the coastal intertidal to the open ocean.

[taxonomytournament]

Taxonomy Tournament: Spiralia

Phoronida. This phylum is made up of marine filter-feeders, known as horseshoe worms

Nemertea. This phylum, known as the ribbon worms, is made up of mostly carnivorous worms with a proboscis

[dougdimmadodo]

Common Atlantic Ribbon Worm (Tubulanus polymorphus)

Family: Tubulanus Family (Tubulanidae)

IUCN Conservation Status: Unassessed

Like other ribbon worms, this brightly coloured marine worm has a relatively long but extremely thin unsegmented body, and is an active predator; after locating prey using a set of chemical-sensing pits on its head it extends a sticky, flexible, tube-like appendage known as a proboscis (although unlike the proboscises of some insects this structure is separate from their digestive system) from just above it mouth, ensnaring prey and injecting it with paralysing venom. After prey (mainly smaller marine invertebrates, especially other worms) has been subdued the proboscis either passes it into a simple mouth or, if its too large to be swallowed whole, secretes fluids that break food down externally to accommodate for the worm's lack of an ability to chew.

--------------------------------------------------------

Image Source: Here

[todaysbug]

February 13th, 2024

Antarctic Nemertean Worm (Parborlasia corrugatus)

Distribution: Widely distributed in the cold southern seas surrounding Antarctica, as far north as Peru.

Habitat: Epibenthic and marine; found in intertidal zones down to depths of 3590 metres.

Diet: Scavenger and predator; feeds on detritus diatoms, gastropods, amphipods, isopods, vertebrate carrion, sponges, jellyfish, seastars, molluscs, anemones and polychaete worms.

Description: P. corrugatus is a huge ribbonworm that can grow up to 2 metres in length. Like all ribbonworms, this species does not have a dedicated respiratory system, instead breathing through its skin; animals who breathe this way are typically quite small so the oxygen can reach every part of their body, which makes this worm's size even more impressive. Luckily, the Southern ocean is oxygen-rich, and the ribbonworm has a slow metabolism that uses up little oxygen. When it starts to lack oxygen, it flattens itself out to maximize oxygen diffusion throughout its body.

Despite its size, P. corrugatus still has predators. In order to defend itself, it has a proboscis it can deploy in moments, covered in barbs and adhesives (which it also uses to hunt its prey!). If this isn't enough to dissuade predators, it also has an acidic mucus with a pH of 3.5.

Images by Martin Rauschert and Jackson Chu.

[larval]

Bootlace worm

This is Lineus longissimus, a nemertean known as the bootlace worm. It's one of the longest animals in the world. A specimen caught in Scotland after a storm is thought to have been almost 60 meters long. Although this might be an exceptional case, there's enough evidence that these can reach about 30 meters (the length of a blue whale).

Reference:

https://brunovellutini.com/posts/lineus-longissimus-longest-animal/

Source:

[thegodhand7]

[h0useofw0lves]

i just want a url of an animal taxon that i like is that too mucb to ask

[bestanimal]

Round 1 Final Stats:

The top phyla have been ranked thusly, listed here from highest ranking to lowest:

🪲 Arthropoda ~ 2,002

🐠 Chordata ~ 1,780

🐌 Mollusca ~ 1,687

🪸 Cnidaria ~ 1,307

🫓 Platyhelminthes ~ 1,217

🔫 Onychophora ~ 1,180

🔬 Tardigrada ~ 1,101

🌈 Ctenophora ~ 1,013

⭐️ Echinodermata ~ 947

🪱 Annelida ~ 681

🧽 Porifera ~ 535

👥 Bryozoa ~ 331

⚪️ Placozoa ~ 328

⛱ Brachiopoda ~ 303

⚙️ Rotifera ~ 298

🍆 Priapulida ~ 216

🧲 Phoronida ~ 178

🌍 Nematoda ~ 169

🐉 Kinorhyncha ~ 169

🌰 Hemichordata ~ 169

🎉 Loricifera ~ 147

🎗 Nemertea ~ 138

❄️ Micrognathozoa ~ 124

🧪 Xenacoelomorpha ~ 123

🍴 Entoprocta ~ 111

👛 Cycliophora ~ 110

🦷 Gnathostomulida ~ 100

🏹 Chaetognatha ~ 83

🧶 Gastrotricha ~ 82

🐙🔍 Dicyemida ~ 19

🦪🔍 Orthonectida ~ 12

🐴✂️ Nematomorpha ~ -37

The top 3 phyla are Arthropoda, Chordata, and Mollusca!

This means Arthropoda, Chordata, and Mollusca will be moving on to Round 2, and broken up by Class (or some other phylogenetic equivalent).

But that’s not all!

After Round 2, we will have an extra Round 2.5, featuring every other phylum that received over 1,000 points! This will give some of the more highly ranked phyla a second chance to move on, and make Round 3 a little more interesting.

Round 2.5 will include Cnidaria, Platyhelminthes, Tardigrada, and Ctenophora.

(Unfortunately, I can’t include Onychophora as it only contains 2 families without class or order ranking, so I will have to preemptively move them forward to Round 4 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

To give myself enough time to queue up polls, Round 2 will begin November 1st.

See you then!

Extra Awards:

Phylum Porifera

~ had the highest percentage of likes at 50.8%

Phylum Placozoa

~ had the highest amount of neutral votes at 295

Phylum Xenacoelomorpha

~ had 0 hates

Phylum Platyhelminthes

~ had the most votes at 620

~ had the highest amount of loves at 245

~ had the highest amount of likes at 204

Phylum Gastrotricha

~ had the lowest amount of favorites at 2

~ had the lowest percentage of favorites at 0.7%

Phylum Mollusca

~ had 0 dislikes

~ had the third most reblogs at 86

Phylum Entoprocta

~ had 0 hates

Phylum Phoronida

~ had 0 hates

Phylum Orthonectida

~ had the lowest amount of likes at 20

~ had the least notes at 17

~ had the least reblogs at 6

Phylum Dicyemida

~ had the least votes at 158

~ had the lowest amount of loves at 4

~ had the lowest percentage of loves at 2.5%

~ had the highest percentage of neutral votes at 67.9%

Phylum Micrognathozoa

~ was our first single species to be ranked

~ had 0 hates

Phylum Rotifera

~ had 0 hates

Phylum Nematomorpha

~ had the highest amount of dislikes at 74

~ had the highest percentage of dislikes at 30.1%

~ had the highest percentage of hates at 11.4%

~ was the only phylum with a negative ranking

Phylum Onychophora

~ had the most notes at 310

~ had the most reblogs at 115 (though a lot of them happened after the poll closed)

Phylum Arthropoda

~ was the only phylum to get over 2,000 points

~ had the second most reblogs at 101

~ had 0 hates

Phylum Echinodermata

~ had the highest percentage of loves at 52.8%

~ was the only phylum to not receive any dislikes or hates

Phylum Chordata

~ had the highest amount of favorites at 334

~ had the highest percentage of favorites at 71.5%

~ had the lowest percentage of likes at 4.9%

~ had the lowest percentage of neutral votes at 0.6%

~ had the highest amount of hates at 37

[crevicedwelling]

just watched this Geonemertes pelaensis catch a wolf spider! these terrestrial ribbon worms hunt by firing their proboscis at prey like a harpoon, envenomating them. this spider stopped moving instantly after the proboscis made contact—I’ll try to get a video of it next time… one of the most bizarre hunting techniques I’ve seen.

[grison-in-space]

A friend of mine has a dog behavior challenge they're seeking advice for and I thought you might be able to help if you have time or direct them to someone who can! https://www.tumblr.com/nemertea/760896232858271744/does-anyone-have-any-good-resources-for-dealing

Here's a link for ease of clicking, but the issue overall seems to be "how do you cope with what seems to be a desire specifically to control a secondary animal's access to social resources rather than fear that the other animal will prevent the focal animal from accessing them?"

I really wish I had a clear set of resources for your friend, because it seems really similar to something I have been struggling with between Matilda (21 months) and my 13yo dog Tribble, in which Matilda appeared to want to herd Tribble into her crate and control her access to humans and social outlets. Working on this has been on pause for the past six weeks since Matilda's eye abscess exploded on us, but I'm beginning to pick it up again now: the dogs have been on crate and rotate since just before the eye abscess blew up, and that isn't a good long term solution, so now we see if we can actually resolve the problem.

My current opinion on how to move forward involves making it clear that I, the human, am not tolerating the "herding" behavior in my space and that it will result in being removed from the situation entirely. This means that you have to be able to prevent the dog causing the problem from redirecting onto the cat and doubling down when corrected, which is one of the failure modes I ran into initially. (It also means you have to rehab your cats' trust that you can and will fix the situation, and prevent your cats from inflaming the situation further by redirecting onto the problem dog.)

IDK, y'all, I'm still sketching out my treatment plan beyond the current stage, which is using shared licky mats with one dog crated to reduce the tension and memory of conflicts between the two dogs and replace them with memory of time spent licking in low-stress situations. We will be then leashing both dogs and spending time in the same room with (you guessed it) more licky and chewing time, with each dog rewarded for glancing at the other and disengaging. Eventually, I'd advance to both dogs leashed + direct interactions of the sort the "controlling" dog has tried to veto, and then treat that stimulus like reactivity counterconditioning: the "controlling" dog must sit without barking or pulling etc and will be body-blocked and interrupted if she tries to bother the other animal, but can earn infinite high-value rewards from simply looking quietly while the other animal receives the coveted attention.

Comments and suggestions from other trainers with similar experience would be welcomed, I suspect!

[taxonomytournament]

Taxonomy Tournament: Spiralia

Lingulida. Brachiopods of this order have a long shell and a fleshy stalk with which it burrows into sand/mud. Includes Lingula, the oldest animal genus with species still alive today

Nemertea. This phylum, known as the ribbon worms, is made up of mostly carnivorous worms with a proboscis

[animalshowdown]

Official Phylum Bracket!

Below is the official matchup list for the Phylum rounds!

There are 33 phyla in the Showdown lineup, so after the polls close on Round 1, the winner of Xenacoelomorpha vs. Hemichordata will go up against Micrognathozoa in Round 1.5 before we move on.

How this bracket was created:

After assembling the list of phyla, I ranked them based on my best guess of how they would perform in the polls. I then split the list into the Top 16 and the Bottom 16 (minus Micrognathozoa), and created a bracket for each half using this site. I split up the list because it felt unfair not to give the less charismatic phyla at least a chance to compete! I've been affectionately calling the Bottom 16 matchups the "Micro-Royale" :) From there, I created a new bracket, alternating matchups between the Top 16 and Bottom 16.

Since Tumblr is probably going to crunch the image quality, the bracket matchups are listed in text format below the Keep Reading.

Round 1:

Round 2:

Arthropoda vs. Brachiopoda

Priapulida vs. Placozoa

Platyhelminthes vs. Onychophora

Loricifera vs. Gastrotricha

Annelida vs. Nematoda

Cycliophora vs. Gnathostomulida

Phoronida vs. Cnidaria

Dicyemida vs. Chaetognatha

Mollusca vs. Bryozoa

Nematomorpha vs. Orthonectida

Nemertea vs. Ctenophora

Acanthocephala vs. Tardigrada

Echinodermata vs. Porifera

Rotifera vs. Kinorhyncha

Entoprocta vs. Chordata

Xenacoelomorpha vs. Hemichordata

>> (Micrognathozoa will challenge the winner of this matchup)

Arthropoda vs. Placozoa

Onychophora vs. Loricifera

Annelida vs. Cycliophora

Cnidaria vs. Chaetognatha

Mollusca vs. Nematomorpha

Ctenophora vs. Tardigrada

Echinodermata vs. Rotifera

Chordata vs. Micrognathozoa

Round 3:

Arthropoda vs. Onychophora

Annelida vs. Cnidaria

Mollusca vs. Ctenophora

Echinodermata vs. Chordata

[beadyeyes]

I can't find the og on my blog so I think I deleted it but I remember getting hounded with comments calling me OP and demanding why I made some thing so cursed .when this is like 2 out of 10 at best... Any ways I wanted to go off on why made it this way for ever but I forgot until now okay

So it was based on a cross between a mycelium (seen as unmoving, colony, roots), nemertea (digestion), and starfish (digestion and mouth). It's "tendrils" aka insulators connect the "digestive track" aka conductor wires like a proboscis that doesn't retract. It feeds on what lands on them by using extracellular digestion. The "primary limb" is supposed to represent the insulator disks aka how dangerous the tower is. The mouth and excretory system are close and at the bottom because it serves as secondary to it's main feeding method, but also as a play on how the current is safest fed in to the ground. The false eye is on the earth wire because if you touch it you'll most likely die. Idk😋 funny image

[thedailydescent]

Asks are off, so I'm submitting this. I just had a question about the marine biology quiz: who was the orca that died after being separated from their young? I like to think I know a lot.about orcas but I don't remember hearing about that. I know they can grieve pretty hard but I didnt recall anything about dying, and I'm curious now Thanks!

Hi!!

So, it turns out there is an error in the uquiz: there are actually no recorded cases of an orca dying of grief after being separated from their calf! There are cases of calves in captivity being separated from their mothers way too early, with the mother afterwards heard emitting unusually loud vocals for days afterwards, acting erratic, avoiding others, and staying in one corner of the pool. And in the wild, there are frequent cases of a mother carrying their dead calf around for hours/days, with the most famous case being Tahlequah (J35), who carried her calf, who died a half hour after it was born, for 17 days afterwards. When she finally let the calf go, she rejoined her pod with no signs of strange behaviour afterwards.

The closest thing I could find was Maris, a captive beluga whale, who died suddenly of a heart attack soon after her calf died, despite not having or showing any health problems beforehand. And because the whole "humans can die of a broken heart aka a heart attack after a stressful period of loss", some people have suggested that was what happened there. However, as pointed out by @nemertea and others in the comments, you can't scientifically apply human behaviour to other animals, because they are, after all, a different species whose emotional processes are still very unknown to us. It also neglects to look at the mitigating factors: being that beluga whales have already been shown to not do well in captivity, and we don't know if Maris perhaps had a genetic predisposition to heart failure.

I am posting this in the tags as well as mentioned in the replies so that people are better informed and this misinformation isn't spread further!

[phylum-phight-tourney]

WAR AND HATE ON PLANET EARTH

WELCOME TO THE PHYLUM PHIGHT

A BRACKET WHERE THE 37 KNOWN PHYLA OF ANIMALS (extant and otherwise) WILL BATTLE TO THE DEATH. ONLY ONE MAY BE CROWNED CHAMPION-- AND ASCEND TO THE STATUS OF KINGDOM (i have this power)

WHO WILL IT BE? THE CHORDATES, CONTAINING EVERY KNOWN VERTEBRATE INCLUDING YOU AND ME? I FEEL LIKE THAT'S A BIAS. MAYBE THE HUMBLE TARDIGRADES, THE INTERNET'S FAVOURITE EXTREMOPHILES? OR WILL IT BE THE PENIS WORMS? I FEEL LIKE IT'S GONNA BE THE PENIS WORMS.

TOURNAMENT STRUCTURE:

ok ditching allcaps now <3

round 0

preliminary face-off between the odd phellas. lasting one (1) week to give bitches time to mobilise

protoarticulata VS rhombozoa

2. phoronida VS vetulicolia

3. petalonamae VS xenacoelomorpha

4. porifera VS rotifera

5. platyhelminthes VS saccorhytida

round 1

all round 1 poll-batches will last one (1) day because dear god there are so many of them. there will however be a cooldown of like, a couple days or something between batches because i am but one man

batch 1 - BATCH TO THE DEATH

6. priapulida VS winner of 1

7. annelida VS chaetognatha

8. trilobozoa VS micrognathozoa

9. bryozoa VS lorcifera

batch 2 - THE BATCHENING

10. tardigrada VS winner of 2

11. brachiopoda VS gastrotricha

12. mollusca VS winner of 3

13. nematomorpha VS gnathostomulida

batch 3 - BATCHETFIELD HIGH

14. chordata VS winner of 4

15. archaecyatha VS cycliophora

16. nematoda VS nemertea

17. ctenophora VS kinohyncha

batch 4 - I HAVE RUN OUT OF BATCH PUNS

18. arthropoda VS winner of 5

19. agmata VS entoprocta

20. cnidaria VS onychophora

21. echinodermata VS hemichordata

round three wait and see!!!

this bracket doesn't require nominations, as the candidates are already set out all nicey for us by Science. how cool of them. Now we make them beat each other senseless for our sick amusement :)

HOWEVER please send asks, suggest representative species or images to make sure we see them at their best, send propaganda/fun facts youd like the filthy electorate to know before they condemn your fav to the deepest most basal pits of taxonomic superhell. lets all get to know the Beasts together. Before we make them fight to the death.

-mod riz (he/him)

ROUND 0 START: APRIL 10TH