Welcome to Brainstye, a production of I Heart Radio, Hey brain Stuff Lauren Vogel bomb here. It's a skinny creature, not much wider than a number two pencil. Yet it's one of the longest animals alive today, sometimes rivaling or perhaps surpassing the mighty blue whale in length, which can grow to a little more than a hundred feet or thirty meters long. It has no heart, no spine, no body segments. It lurks in mud, sand, and rocky crevices
around the North Atlantic. It's mucus is surprisingly toxic, and when hunger strikes, it summons a winding branch like appendage that gets turned inside out. Its name is Linneus longissimus, or the boot lace worm, and someday this marine oddity might be enlisted to help farmers protect their crops. But let's back up a little. In order to make any sense of the bootlace worm, you have to take a look at its odd branch on the Great Tree of life.
The boot lace worm is the largest member of the animal phylum Nemerdia, also known as ribbon worms or probiscus worms. This group includes about one thousand, two hundred documented species. Unlike the more familiar earthworms, which areate our soil and keep bait shops in business, bootlace worms do not have segmented bodies. The blood of a ribbon worm is held in a series of vessels. When the walls of these constrict, the blood inside is pushed in one direction or another,
allowing it to circulate throughout the body. The normal muscle contractions associated with swimming and crawling help this process. No heart is required to keep the blood flowing. One defining trait of the Nomerdia phylum is a tubular feeding structure called the probiscus. Usually it's tucked away in a specialized pouch. However, when the need arises, a ribbon worm applies pressure to the area. The force drives the probiscus tube outside of
the body by quite literally flipping it inside out. All of this can happen in a matter of seconds. Okay, but why? Ribbon worms eat a variety of things. Some are herbivores, but many eat things like crabs, snails, and animal carcasses. Having a quick drop robiscus really helps these legless animals catch and manipulate food. Sometimes the probiscus is also used as a digging tool, and it can definitely
freak out predators who try to eat the worms. You can't blame other creatures for feeling confused or even a bit intimidated by the display. Certain ribbon worms can double their body length just by whipping out their probiscus. Like most, though not all, ribbon worms, the bootley sworm occurs in marine habitats. They're indigenous to the northeastern Atlantic Ocean and live around the coastlines of Iceland, Germany, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Ireland,
Great Britain, and the Baltic Sea. The worms like to bundle themselves up underneath large bowlders by the shore. Other hangout spots include rock fissures, beds of kelp, and natural seaside pools. You also might see them slithering around on muddy beach sand further offshore. Bootleace worms frequent sunlit parts of the ocean floor, winding their sinuous bodies through beds of muck and seashells. Divers sometimes find them adrift in the water as well. Bootlea sworms come in shades of
black and dark brown. Their skin might appear iridescent or striped, at least to our fancy human eyes. A ribbon worms can't see images like we can. Instead, they detect changes in light conditions through primitive sensory eye spots. Though the bootley sworm is only a quarter to half an inch wide, that's about five to ten millimeters, it's one of the longest known animals on the planet, full stop. They're usually in the neighborhood of sixteen to thirty two feet long.
That's five to ten meters. Pretty respectable for a worm, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Specimens measuring up to thirty meters long nearly a hundred feet have been sighted. If the image of a wriggling worm longer than a New York City bus disturbs you, maybe skip ahead. Things are about to get even more mind blowing. The carcass of a monstrous bootlace worm reportedly washed ashore in Scotland during the year eighteen sixty four from end to end.
It was said to measure for wait for it, more than a hundred and eighty feet or fifty five meters long. However, claims like this should be taken with a grain of salt. The scientific community doesn't have any preserved specimens of a bootlace worm measuring anywhere near that size. Also, because ribbon worms in general are stretchable, elastic critters with bodies prone to distortion, it can be hard to pin down their
maximum lengths. Anyway, if handling bootlace worms doesn't sound like a pleasant experience, you're absolutely right toward off predators and grabby people. The invertebrates release huge amounts of thick, foul smelling mucus when they feel threatened, and there's more of the substance than meets the eye or knows. Naturalists have learned that the bootlace worms defensive mucus is loaded with
peptide toxins. Indeed, when a team examined the stuff in twenty eighteen, they discovered an entirely new group of said toxins, hitherto unknown to science. The researchers noted that the most common of these peptides probably isn't poisonous to human beings or other mammals, but crustaceans and cockroaches might want to
keep their distance. It's been shown to interfere with nerve and muscle function in some crabs and roaches to the point that it can leave the critters dead or permanently paralyzed, so who knows. In the near future, products derived from the bootlace worms stinky mucus may keep pest insects from ruining farms and cash crops. The Stranger Things Have Happened m Today's episode is based on the article bootleace worms can grow longer than most whales on house toffworks dot Com.
Written by Mark Mancini. Brain Stuff is production of I Heart Radio and partnership with house toffworks dot Com, and it is produced by Tyler Clang. Four more podcasts from my heart Radio. Visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.