#TURBELLARIA HAVE EYES

[jask-jaskier-jaskiest]

Studies are giving a headache

[quercussp]

whats your fav animal and why? i like the spotted hyena personally :)

hey anon! i’ve already answered this question twice before, and those times my answers were pentastomids and velvet worms. but don’t worry, i have plenty of favorite animals! and while spotted hyenas are a solid choice, i’m going to go with free living flat worms called Turbellaria, which are not only very very pretty  

but are also kind of insane.

So these are considered to be quite primitive animals with a very simple nervous system, but what is remarkable about them is how well they regenerate. If you cut a worm like that in half, both halves will grow into fully functional worms. You can cut them into ten pieces and you’ll get ten worms. You can also make a slight cut on any part of their body, and that cut will grow into a head, fully equipped with a brain and eyes..

But that’s not it.

So even though their nervous system isn’t very sophisticated, they do have eyes and a brain, and you can teach them some very easy reactions, such as moving towards a stimulus for food. But here’s the cool thing: you can train a worm to react to a particular stimulus (something they never do naturally), then cut it in half, and when the part without the head (the tail part) will regrow a full head and new brain… IT WILL STILL REMEMBER IT’S TRAINING!!! It’s such an amazing thing, I am shivering just thinking about it. We usually think that memory is stored in the brain, but for some reason, these animals can store memory somewhere outside of their brain? Maybe? No one knows. But I mean, how can you not love them after knowing this. Isn’t it just crazy?