![]() But why the acorn worm was lying next to it, I do not know. I thought that maybe during this process, someone had stepped on the sea cucumber. ![]() ![]() The fisher gently inserts the stick tip into the hole and lets the curious octopus crawl onto it. The skilled part is spotting a hiding octopus. The fisher snorkels or walks a shallow reef armed with a spear, or stick and a sack. I don’t fish for octopuses but the internet showed me how it goes. My best guess as to what happened was that the sea floor had been disturbed by octopus hunters who frequent the area. I was thrilled to have made its acquaintance, but how it came to be lying out in the open, empty of sand, is a mystery. Julie Bailey-Brock of the University of Hawaii WormLab identified it in my photo, did I know that I’d seen my first acorn worm in the flesh. I have read about, and admired, acorn worms for years, but not wanting to harm one, had merely seen their casts. The skin of their bodies trailing behind is so thin that if you dig one up, the weight of the sand or mud inside can easily tear open the body wall, which kills the creature. Those piles aren’t poo.Īcorn worms get their name from their muscular, burrowing heads that resemble acorns. Kaneohe Bay’s sand bar is a good place to see dozens, sometimes hundreds, of acorn worm castings. The piles often appear darker than the white sand they rest on because the worm has burrowed into mud below. The mounds, called fecal casts, are often mistaken for feces, but for material that comes out of a marine animal’s anus, it’s pretty clean stuff. After digesting mixed-in organic matter, the worm deposits clean grit on the ocean floor in squiggly piles. Most acorn worms live in u-shaped burrows under sand or mud, sucking the surrounding substance into their mouths. The fragile, soft-bodied creatures’ only defense against predators such as cone and auger snails is to stay out of sight. I say somehow because we rarely see acorn worms out in the open. In addition to causing the sea cucumber to disgorge its guts, the disturbance had also somehow exposed an intact acorn worm about 2 feet long. A few weeks ago, I wrote that while snorkeling I found the red gonads of a sea cucumber, cast out when something threatened the animal.
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