Today I want to take you to know about the flat animal pedicle planarian.
Leech planarians
Bipalium kewense
Flats, planarians, leeches, leeches. Commonly known as the sky snake, earth clams. It inhabits dark, damp soil or under rocks. Photo taken at the Red River screen.
Planarian leeches have a fan-shaped head, a brownish-yellow or orange-yellow body color, and are symmetrically distributed with five black longitudinal stripes. Planarian leeches are generally 20 to 30 cm long, and larger ones can reach more than 60 cm in length.
"This one is relatively small, but in the same area I saw a planarian worm nearly 1 meter long, thin and flat, similar to lasagna." Photographer Fan Yi said that because he accidentally encountered the species while photographing the tree frog in the middle of the night, he was shocked by its strange size, so he snapped a picture in time.
Perhaps some friends have heard the story of the "Mongolian Death Worm", according to legend, in the depths of the Mongolian Gobi Desert, there is a huge blood-red worm shaped like an intestine, whose mouth can spew out extremely corrosive venom, and usually hide in the sand dunes to ambush people and animals that come and go in the desert. Whether the "Mongolian Death Worm" exists in reality remains to be examined, but the P. leeches are real "death worms"!
Planarian vermicules are carnivores that feed mainly on earthworms and slugs (commonly known as slugs). When hunting, leech planarians will wrap their bodies around their prey, then secrete a sticky liquid to limit the prey's struggle to resist, and then secrete corrosive digestive enzymes from the mouth to "liquefy" the prey, and then suck it into its "belly" when the prey "liquefies" into juice. The whole process is the same as the "Mongol Death Worm" will attack humans with "extremely corrosive venom".
Because of its damp and mucus-like skin, twisted crawling like an ant, the vermiculite planarian has also appeared in some superstitious legends, and in the past some people even thought that it was a good material for making "clams", and because the plutocarias lived in the dirt, they had the frightening name of "earth clams".
In the animal kingdom, many species do everything they can to fight for a mate in order to reproduce the next generation, but planarians are heterogeneous. The study found that its body structure is hermaphrodite, which allows planarians to breed either sexually or alone without mating.
What is even more amazing is the powerful regenerative ability of the planarian leeches. Studies have found that when there is a shortage of food outside, planarian leeches will eat unimportant organs, such as genitals, as "food". But don't worry, the strong regenerative ability of the leech planarian can make the organs that have been eaten grow back in the case of sufficient food outside, and what is more cattle is that even if it is cut in half with a knife, the planarian worm can also use its strong regenerative ability to make the body cut in half into two new individuals.
Fan Yi is an ecological photographer. He has won the Grand Prize of the International Garden Photographer Annual Competition for 4 consecutive years and the first prize in the wild animal and plant category of the first China Eco-Photography Competition in 2018. He is committed to photographing the cultural landscape and biodiversity of western China, especially in Yunnan.
Coordinator: Lian Huiling
Character arrangement: Tamoto
Poster Design: Zheng Biyin