Not so much at work, as at the Xmas dinner arranged by my employers. One of the chilli mussels I was enjoying turned out to be unexpected crunchy, and what I had expected to be a fragment of mussel shell turned out to a crab, either a Zaops ( oyster crab ) or the closely related Pea Crab, genus Pinnotheres. Both genera used to be Pinnotheres, but ( Read more... )

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I see your pink katydids and raise you blue earthworms.

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I've checked the tag "worm" just to make sure this haven't been posted yet.

I remembered watching the program Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation on the Discovery Channel a few years ago and then on National Geographic's Wild Sex a few weeks ago, reminding me of a strange creature called the green spoon worm. It was the extreme sexual ( Read more... )

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I don't even know what this is, but it is very WTF.

ETA According to a comment below by derumi, "Geonemertes australiensis. Proboscis worm (cuneiforms was very close; it's a terrestrial ribbon worm)."

I had a single page of "deep-sea facts" for many years on my website and always intended to update it, but procrastinated until just last night. Probably not much new to wtf_nature, though I couldn't find much mention of the Xenophyophores here ( Read more... )

A rather fascinating page on parasites.

ETA HURRRR, I posted the 1,337th entry!

Been too long since I've done a parasite post, so...

Lungworm! And Fungus Cannon!

Dictyocaulus is a genus of nematode worms, parasitic upon large herbivores including cattle, elk, deer, horses, and donkeys. They spend most of their life in the lungs, causing the disease 'Husk'. Their eggs, however, get coughed up and swallowed, and hatch into L1 ( Read more... )