LeslieH
Guest
That Chrissy, collecting worms without me..... 
( ... (give her a hug from me, okay?)
Interesting about the "swimming through sand". It's always been assumed that they build permanent burrows because dive guides can find them in the same spot night after night and simply because many eunicids do. A lot of worms though don't build burrows but produce flimsy pseudotubes by constantly secreting mucus as they move through sediment.
Even a small bobbitt will have several hundred pairs of legs & setal bundles acting as anchors holding onto the sediment - that is a lot of muscle! So you get major points for even trying. I have one bobbitt that was collected for me, smallish, incomplete at about 3 feet long, and all the setae were completely stripped or broken off due to the pressure required to drag it out of the burrow. Which means I can't identify it as setal composition is an important species character. Which is a pity because some colleagues & I want to write a paper on it. Ah well, maybe next year.... :bigsmile:
( ... (give her a hug from me, okay?)Interesting about the "swimming through sand". It's always been assumed that they build permanent burrows because dive guides can find them in the same spot night after night and simply because many eunicids do. A lot of worms though don't build burrows but produce flimsy pseudotubes by constantly secreting mucus as they move through sediment.
Even a small bobbitt will have several hundred pairs of legs & setal bundles acting as anchors holding onto the sediment - that is a lot of muscle! So you get major points for even trying. I have one bobbitt that was collected for me, smallish, incomplete at about 3 feet long, and all the setae were completely stripped or broken off due to the pressure required to drag it out of the burrow. Which means I can't identify it as setal composition is an important species character. Which is a pity because some colleagues & I want to write a paper on it. Ah well, maybe next year.... :bigsmile:
