Hammerhead worms

When the trail is followed to the edge of the light, what comes into view makes a hand tremble, a flat, softly yielding strip of flesh about half a meter long, and at its head in place of a face, a hammer-shaped blade spread out to both sides.

slowly sweeping across the ground as if reading the world through soundless movements the creature has no eyes and yet it appears to know exactly where it is going the hammerhead flatworm a creature that a number of nations have classed among their national horrors not because it growls or attacks people but because of the numbers sitting in its file up to half a meter long no true eyes no natural predators reproducing without ever needing a parker cutting itself into to clone itself and carrying tetrodotoxin in its flesh the notorious nerve poison of the puffer fish the toxin ranked among the deadliest on the planet and one that to this day has no antidote in this extended special edition the entire file on the strangest predator on the planet will be opened layer by layer like a case kept sealed for more than a century there will be the origin story of a life-form older than the dinosaurs and the first recorded case filed in eighteen seventy eight at the most prestigious garden in london there will be hunting in the dark a coiling strike like a miniature anaconda and a poison long believed to be something only higher organisms could produce there will be the question that makes every one look differently at the hoe in their hands why does a gardener's blade instead of killing the worm produce more worms and at the end comes the most frightening chapter of all the disease that can hide inside its slime coat and the things that must absolutely be remembered if one day it is met face to face in the garden the investigation to-day unfolds in four chapters chapter i the survivor from another era the lineage of the land flatworms the hammer-shaped head and the case first opened in london in eighteen seventy eight chapter two the hunter of the night the tactic of the hammer sweeping the ground the finishing move that scientists named farangio capping and the venom of the puffer fish sitting inside the body of a worm chapter three the perfect copy the reproductive method that turns every worm into an entire army and the quiet conspiracy against the ecosystem beneath the ground chapter four the seed of disease wearing a coat of slime the rat lungworm parasite the warnings from health authorities and the three things to remember when coming face to face with it chapter one begins right now before stepping into the file the provenance of what is about to be told needs to be stated clearly because in the age of fake news provenance decides everything The details in this episode are based on research published in the journal PLOS One in 2014 on the toxicity of hammerhead flatworms, information from the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on tetrodotoxin and on the rat lungworm parasite.

figures described by biologists as of twenty twenty three and even a species record from vietnam itself which means this story does not take place in some faraway land but could take place in a home garden this is science and discovery where the strangest creatures on the planet are told as a story and today's story begins a very long time ago before the dinosaurs ever appeared hundreds of millions of years ago when the continents were still fitted together in shapes nothing like today's one branch of the flatworm lineage did something few living things dared to do at the time it left the water its relatives stayed behind in the sea in streams and lakes and to this day they still live there but the branch that left chose a far harder road crawling on a shore where there was no longer a blanket of water round the body where sunlight could dry out a soft boneless creature within hours and where prey no longer drifted by in the open but hid in crevices under rocks In the dark, that departing branch is the ancestor of the Geoplanidae, the family of land flatworms, the lineage whose most famous and most peculiar genus is the hammerhead flatworm.

To grasp how ancient that journey is, they were crawling across the ground before the dinosaurs appeared.

The dinosaurs arrived, ruled, and vanished.

As of 2023, biologists have described roughly 910 species of land flatworms, but the habits of these bizarre creatures remain largely a blind spot, and many of their mysteries have never been touched by science.

to live on land this family had to rewrite its entire survival manual the body of a flatworm is a thin flat sack of muscle no skeleton no supporting frame and most importantly no respiratory system like the ones found in most familiar animals they breathe through their skin by simple direct diffusion oxygen in the air seeps through the thin skin into the tissue fluid and reaches every cell that is why their bodies must be thin flat and constantly moist a flatworm left out in the sun will lose water and die within a short time which is why they choose to live in cool damp places under stones under rotting logs in soil crevices in thick layers of fallen leaves and only glide out to feed at night When the humidity rises, the coat of slime covering the whole body is both armor against water loss and a lubricant for gliding, and as Chapter 4 will show, that same slime coat is sometimes also a vehicle-carrying disease.

Within that family, the hammerhead flatworm is the most peculiar genus, bearing the scientific name bipelium, loosely translated as two shovels.

Okay.

Is that same true with the hammerhead worms? You freeze them, you kill them, or you freeze them.

Yeah.

Do you guys need to know about that still or not?

The best thing for people to do individually when you see them is get rid of them.

Okay.

Those hammerhead worms, that's what they are.

Oh, boy.