Bizarre Bone-Eating Worm Stretches Body 10X its Length to Mate
The Osedax family of bone-eating worms is already pretty strange. The females attach to whale and other bones through snot like structures and devour them. And the males? The males are microscopic dwarfs that live by the hundreds inside the female’s body. At least that’s the way it worked in the Osedax found since their discovery 12 years ago, but scientists recently found a new species of Osedax that’s even stranger from an evolutionary standpoint, Osedax priapus. Found at a depth of 700 meters, the new species has abandoned the dwarf state and has males that are almost the same size as the females. They live separately and also attach to and eat bone. “This discovery was very unexpected,” said study co-author marine biologist Greg Rouse at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. “It’s the first known example of such a dramatic evolutionary reversal from dwarf males.” “Evolutionary reversals to ancestral states are very rare in the animal kingdom,” said coauthor Robert Vrijenhoek of the Monterey Bay Aquarium