melev

Nice catch Marc. Red line the "pulse"? That'll keep you awake at night!

Looks like a crazy little bugger, some sort of aquatic millipede of sorts. Hope that you don't have (m)any more. Thanks for sharing!

those are nasty...... i found 1 in my tank.
mine was the length of 1.5 coke bottles.... (scary)(it broke right when i had the camera ready to go....)

Here's more info about it: http://www.reefaddicts.com/content.p...st-of-the-Week

Nice catch Marc. I had a similar worm in my nano a few years back, but it had 4 rigid antenna coming out of it's head and visible nasty looking jaws. I eventually identified it as a harmless worm that only fed on pods.

i had on in my tank thought it was a bristle till i watched it reach out of a rock and then slip under a snail on the glass and min later the snail fell to sand where the worm proceeded to eat it. good catch.

I'm weeks late into the game, but I can't resist a worm post. I must be a handful of freaks who's fascinated by these guys.

As you probably may have guessed, the moving red line is its dorsal blood vessel. All segmented worms (bristle worms, fan worms, earth worms, leeches) have two large blood vessels, one on the top and the other bottom. Sometimes it's possible to see the blood flow through it as in your video.

I'm more curious as to why the rear of the worm has such a distinctly different color, and I wonder whether the worm is developing an epitoke. An epitoke is a reproductive stage found in some segmented worms, where their rear segments will start to develop differently, literally break off and swim near the surface to meet up with other epitokes to release their sperm and egg. The rest of the worm that stays at the bottom will regrow the lost segments. I've seen a few epitokes swim around in my tank one night a few months ago. If it is true then you caught the worm just in the nick of time.

Well, that's great news and I'm happy I saw it. I saw something that looked like that pulsating tail tonight just going back into the bushy macro algae and I was halfway tempted to rip out everything to find another worm, but didn't go for it.