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Bobbit Worm — printable fact sheet
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Bobbit Worm
Eunice aphroditois
The bobbit worm is a marine bristle worm that can exceed 3 m in length, and it spends its life buried in the seabed with only a few centimetres protruding. Five antennae fan out across the sediment, and when they detect a fish, the worm everts a muscular pharynx and strikes so f…
Did you know?
- The Bobbit worm is named after a notorious 1990s incident, but there is no evidence the worm actually bites off appendages.
- In 2009, staff at the Blue Reef Aquarium in Newquay spent months puzzling over fish disappearing and a coral reef being sliced apart before they dismantled the tank and found a metre-long bobbit worm that had arrived years earlier hidden in live rock; they named it Barry. In 2021 palaeontologists described Pennichnus formosae, a distinctive 20-million-year-old L-shaped burrow trace fossil from Taiwan, interpreted as the ambush lair of an ancestral bobbit-like worm — a predator known almost entirely from the hole it left. Its iridescent body is genuinely beautiful under light, banded in bronze and purple.
What I learned
Draw the bobbit worm
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