Skepticism

Slime shooting velvet worm (of doom)

Sounds cool, right, slime shooting worm? Well, it is MUCH cooler than you think.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVb9yUOek88]

Found at Neatorama.

Amanda

Amanda works in healthcare, is a loudmouthed feminist, and proud supporter of the Oxford comma.

Related Articles

16 Comments

  1. I am now embarrassed to admit that I didn’t even think of how perverted “slime shooting velvet worm” sounds.

  2. Critters related to the guy in this video are banes of the home marine aquarium: they are hard to catch, grow and grow and grow, and use these mucusy nets to catch and kill beneficial inverts like snails.

  3. Holy crap! So… what exactly is that thing? Not an insect or arthropod of course, but… what? Mollusk? Am I being dense and it actually is a worm?

  4. Velvet worms are actually really interesting in terms of taxonomy. They were once believed to be sort of the Archeopteryx of Arthropods–a sort of transitional form between a segmented worm and a centipede type animal. There are fossils that are almost exactly the same as the living animals today, too.

    Unfortunately, their DNA has turned out to just muddle up the story–they seem to be related to everything and nothing.

    UC Berkeley museum has a nice page about them, and you can look at their Tree of Life page if you want to see the taxonomists argue about them.

  5. Velvet worms are actually really interesting in terms of taxonomy. They were once believed to be sort of the Archeopteryx of Arthropods–a sort of transitional form between a segmented worm and a centipede type animal.

    Of course we now know they are closely related to the One-Eyed Trouser Snake…

    (ducks and runs)

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Back to top button