There are, sometimes, things you don’t ever want to see. Not because they go bump in the night, not because they are particularly dangerous, but because, like the Bobbit worm, they are just so spine-tinglingly creepy when they crawl out of the reef that they make you want to reconsider your love of the underwater world.
The first time I encountered a Bobbit worm, it wasn’t actually a Bobbit worm, although it was very similar in appearance. At that time, I was diving around the Caribbean island of Curaçao when this metre-long ‘thing’ scuttled out of its hidey-hole, snaked around a couple of small coral blocks and then vanished once again beneath the murk.
My skin crawled with the visual equivalent of fingernails being scraped along a blackboard and, as we were in shallow water swimming towards our exit point, my buddy stood up and excitedly exclaimed: ‘It’s The Thing!’ I did not think this a particularly scientific description, however, Helmut Debilius’ bible of Caribbean reef fish labelled it as exactly that: The Thing.
I don’t recall if it even had a scientific name listed in the book, and there was no information whatsoever to be found on the Internet of 2009, but it remained in my memory as one of those awful things that, like the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard, you can never not recall.
The second time I saw one was in Lembeh, in 2013, in a pose very similar to the one in the photograph below. It didn’t come out of its burrow; just its head, jaws and antennae (I did not really stop to investigate which was which) and maybe 10cm of its segmented body were visible before I swam nearer (not because I wanted to, but because that is the way I was going), and with a flash of black sand, the nightmare was gone.
There was still very little information available; indeed, I did not even discover what the creature might actually be until I wrote a top-ten collection of creepy fish for Halloween a few years ago, and there it was.
The Bobbit worm, (Eunice aphroditois) is a segmented worm of the phylum Annelida – which also contains its distant, but more familiar fireworm relative. It is a polychaete worm, also known as bristle worms for their many chaeta, bristles made of chitin that protrude from each segment of their bodies (polychaete = literally ‘many bristles’).
‘The Thing’, as I would later learn, is not the same animal as the Bobbit worm, and is described as a distinct species (Eunice rousseai), however, bar a few small differences in the hairs that protrude from their bristles, they are remarkably similar – and definitely equally as grim. The few photographs available often use the Bobbit worm, in fact, to depict The Thing.
Bristle worms of various descriptions are found throughout the world’s oceans, from the depths of the Mariana Trench to shallow coral reefs, varying in size from the minute to the massive – and they have been around for some time. The earliest fossil records place the evolution of giant polychaete worms within the Ordovician period, some 400 million years ago, and a fossilised Bobbit worm burrow preserved intact was dated to more than 20 million years ago.
First described by Prussian zoologist, Peter Simon Pallas, in 1788 from a specimen collected in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon), the Bobbit worm was originally lumped in together with other bristle worms and named Nereis aphroditois. Why Pallas named it after the Greek goddess of love will never be known, however, the chap clearly had a sense of humour.
The name was later changed to Eunice aphroditois; the new family name coined by Baron Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric Cuvier – also known as ‘Georges’ – the same fellow who lends his name to Galeocerdo cuvier – the tiger shark. The origins of the name change are unclear, but seem to boil down to the fact that the late 18th century represented an age of discovery in which different scientists were studying the same things but without knowing what the others were doing.
The Bobbit worm’s current name may or may not originate with the grisly tale of John and Lorena Bobbitt, the precise details of which I will not mention here, but which involved the severing of a body part with a pair of scissors, which was later re-attached and proved… functional.
Eunice aphroditois‘ new nickname may therefore have been a reference to the scissor-like fashion in which its very powerful mandibles are capable of bisecting their lunch, or, indeed, perhaps a reference to the fact that if you chop a Bobbit worm in half, it will regenerate both a new tail and a new head, and make two new worms.
Bobbit worms can grow up to 3m in length, although most are likely to be between 1-2m in their adult phase. They will lurk in their burrows waiting for prey to pass by, before launching themselves at speed towards it, giving them the other name by which they have been known – the sand-striker.
The bristles are not ‘legs’ in the manner of articulated ambulatory attachments, but the muscles to which they are attached are powerful, lending them the ferocious speed with which they are able to exit their lairs. The bristles also act as several thousand tiny anchors in the sand, giving the worm a powerful grip on its surroundings and making them virtually impossible to extract from their burrows.
Eunice aphroditois also appears to be extraordinarily difficult to kill. While there is limited research into any of the relevant species, the Bobbit worm’s capability for survival was documented in an aquaculture enthusiast’s forum by an aquarium owner who noticed that something was eating his fish, and the stony coral, like it was crunching on cookies.
The Bobbit Worm Chronicles went down in legend amongst the community, as the owner documented his attempts to poison, catch or kill the intruder with copper, superglue, broken glass and baited fishhooks, only to find it survived even the crushing of the rock in which it was finally caught. The worm spent its remaining days as a living exhibit in an aquarium shop, before being preserved in formaldehyde and donated to science.
Like many of the things we fear, the Bobbit worm, and its Caribbean counterpart, ‘The Thing’, pose little threat to humans. Their bristles are toxic and capable of inflicting a nasty sting, and their mandibles are certainly sharp and powerful enough to inflict some damage should one decide to bite at your tasty-looking finger.
To date, however, there are no recorded incidents of a Bobbit worm striking a diver, but maybe – just maybe – gentlemen, given the name with which it has been given, it might be better to skip that naked 100th dive if you’re in an area where they’re known to be lurking!
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