A weird worm, discovered in the depths of ocean looks “like the rump of a pig from one side and Mick Jagger’s lips from the other” and scientists say that it may be in the middle of an evolutionary leap.
The strangeness of this hazelnut-sized worm was such that scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) were unable to classify it when it was initially discovered in 2001.
“I was instantly interested in this strange creature that looked like the rump of a pig from one side and Mick Jagger’s lips from the other. Was it a larva that had grown to 10 times the normal size or something new?” Karen Osborn, a research zoologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and an adjunct scientist at MBARI, told Live Science via an email.
Osborn was given a small jar bearing the caption “mystery blob” and instructed to identify it. Eight specimens taken from the mesopelagic zone, or the area between 650 and 3,300 feet (200 and 1,000 metres) of California’s Monterey Bay, were used to officially define the species in 2007.
The perplexing organism appeared to be an oversized larva of a chaetopterid, a family of bristle worms, and DNA sequencing verified that it belonged to this group.
“Chaetopterids are parchment worms, so called because they make papery tubes attached to the seafloor,” Osborn said.
The gathered pigbutt worms appear to be adults, but the researchers are not positive because the specimens also exhibit some characteristics of larvae.
They were five to ten times larger than any other known chaetopterid larvae, yet they lacked any visible sex organs, suggesting that they were still in their early stages of development.
