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.
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.
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I wish I could shoot some kind of… oh, wait, I get it.
I am now embarrassed to admit that I didn’t even think of how perverted “slime shooting velvet worm” sounds.
Bug_girl porn???
that was the sexiest narration of an educational nature film ever!
It’s not an insect–not even an Arthropod (depending on who you talk to, anyway.). So, not of interest to me :D
hahahahahaha, can’t stop laughing!
seriously though, that is one sweet animal
velvet worm, velvet worm
Does whatever a velvet worm can
Can he shoot streams of slime?
um…
…
I got nothin’ :(
That was actually quite erotic.
That was more terrifying than erotic.
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.
The potential innuendos are endless.
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?
I will have nightmares about the velvet worm tonight. And for the rest of my life.
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.
Oh, and this will give you a sense visually where they are taxonomically:
http://www.tolweb.org/Bilateria
If you like the big mappy phylogeny sort of thing, anyway.
Of course we now know they are closely related to the One-Eyed Trouser Snake…
(ducks and runs)