Name: Pigbutt mask (Chaetopterus pugaporcinus)
Where it lives: Central California (primarily around Monterey Bay) and the Channel Islands
What it eats: Marine snow (organic material floating through the ocean)
Why that one‘is amazing: This hazelnut-sized worm is so strange that scientists didn’t know how to categorize it when it was first collected by Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) researchers in 2001.
“I was immediately intrigued by this strange creature that looked like a pig’s butt from one side and Mick Jagger’s lips from the other. Was it a caterpillar that had grown to 10 times its normal size or something new?” Karen Osbornea research zoologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and an adjunct scientist at MBARI, told Live Science via email.
Meet the pigbutt worm 🐷🪱When our team, including @OsbornLab, first saw the unusual pigbutt worm (Chaetopterus pugaporcinus) half a mile below the sea surface, they had a hard time deciding how to categorize such a curious animal. pic.twitter.com/7fN9xDoHYmFebruary 29, 2024
Osborn was given a small jar labeled “mystery blob” and asked to find out what it was. The species was officially described in 2007 from eight individuals collected from the mesopelagic zone—the region between 650 and 3,300 feet (200 to 1,000 meters)—in California’s Monterey Bay.
The puzzling creature looked like an oversized caterpillar of a chaetopterid – a type of brush worm – and DNA sequencing confirmed it was in this family.
“Chaetopterids are parchment worms, so called because they make paper tubes attached to the sea floor,” Osborn said. But unlike its tube-like cousins, which only swim freely in the larval stage, this worm floats through the ocean, using its ballooned midsection for buoyancy.
Scientists believe that the worms collected were adults, but they are not completely sure because the specimens also show some characteristics characteristic of larvae. They had no obvious genitalia, indicating that they were in the younger stages of life, but they were five to ten times larger than any other known chaetopterid larvae. When placed in a tank with the option to lie on the sediment on the bottom, they stayed afloat, indicating that they have no need for this habitat at any stage of their lives.
This led scientists to suggest that worms are in the midst of an “evolutionary leap”, abandoning the ocean floor for a nomadic lifestyle in the water column.
Transporting live specimens back to the research vessel allowed scientists to learn more about this bizarre little creature. For example, its body creates blue light and produces a green, luminescent slime, perhaps to deter predators.
Pigbutt worms eat marine snow – small particles of dead animals, feces and other organic matter. As the “snow” falls to the ocean floor, the worm “casts out a web of string” to catch it, according to MBARI’s website.
Pigbutt worms were named by the remote control vehicle pilots who found the strange lumps. During long hours exploring the deep sea, “the conversation can get a little colorful, especially when you’re faced with searching for something that looks like a pig’s backside,” Osborn said.
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