Nature is a magical and mysterious place, there are many unimaginable life, and there is a creature called worm, worm is a multicellular invertebrate, more than a million such worms around the world, they have the ability to regenerate infinitely, which is also the focus of current scientists' research, and today it is said that an animal with a shape and worm is called a ship maggot. Ship maggots are mollusks whose bodies are wrapped in a calcareous shell and feed on wood, reaching a length of about 1 meter. Scientists have discovered a giant ship maggot (Kuphus polythalamia) in the Philippines, which has a special way of eating in a completely different way than previous ship maggots.
Scientists have conducted relevant studies on this giant ship maggot, and found that their diet is completely different from the previous maggots, because they do not need to stutter at all, but instead they use a microorganism, which can provide enough nutrients for this giant ship maggot, you know, this giant ship maggot can grow up to 1.5 meters in length.
The research team can be said to be full of great curiosity about this animal, so they continue to look for such creatures in the ocean, and scientists confirmed that this kind of marine creatures should prefer to live in remote areas, or in some sediment on the seabed.
Scientists were lucky enough to capture this creature and brought it back to the lab for related research. This mollusk has a relatively hard shell that wraps them intact on its exterior. After the scientists knocked open this shell, they were able to see the soft animal inside, but they were surprised to find that their digestive organs were actually very small, that is to say, in animals of the same size, their digestive organs were much smaller, and the stomach was also particularly small, and they did not find the so-called organs that maggots ate wood for digestion before, and the intestines of this animal were already very short.
Of course, through these studies, scientists have shown that this animal seems to be in their growth process, the stomach and intestines of the body these organs should be almost unnecessary, that is to say, there is no role, so this situation will occur.
If these organs are not needed, then the way they eat has become an aspect of scientists' curiosity, and scientists have found that this giant ship maggot eats completely differently from the previous ship maggots, because they do not need to eat food with their mouths, they just rely on a bacterium that lives in the gills of the body.
Although this animal is relatively large, they only need to rely on these bacteria to obtain enough food. That is to say, these microorganisms parasitize its body, and it needs to provide it with enough food so that it can live. Generally speaking, these are living in the sediment on the seabed, especially in the smelly mud, and a special component contained in these muds is hydrogen sulfide.
This hydrogen sulfide should be more familiar to everyone, people who have studied chemistry should know this special substance, it has a strange taste, that is, like rotten eggs, and these bacteria are using this hydrogen sulfide to make food that is conducive to the life of this giant earthworm, that is, a carbon compound, when they are manufactured, this food will be supplied to this giant ship maggot.
As for how the food they make is supplied, scientists speculate that it is very likely that the food produced by these bacteria does not need to be absorbed through the digestive tract or the like, but can directly use some special ways to transport these nutrients into the blood, so these animals seem to not need to eat anything at all, and can continue to live like this, so it should be different from the previous ship maggots.
As for this giant maggot, their strange predation path really surprised scientists. Of course, this different predation pathway and evolutionary process also give this giant ship maggot a huge advantage to the survival, compared to the use of wood as food, this converted carbon compound may actually be more able to meet the needs of their bodies, because after all, the energy contained is higher than wood.
Although this animal looks particularly ugly, the evolution of their way of eating attracts researchers, why did they evolve this way of eating, and what happened to the organisms that survive on the seabed? Will this way of symbiosis with bacteria continue to evolve in seafloor organisms? These are all things that scientists need to study and discover one by one.
The earth is changing, the living environment of the creatures on the earth is also changing, but the creatures still have to survive, in order to adapt to the changes in the living environment, many creatures have quietly undergone a lot of changes.