Spiny puzzle of a Polychaete worm – watch the movie

Dec 21, 2014 • 1:10 AM UTC

Unknown Location

140x Magnification

Unknown

Manu Prakash

I am a faculty at Stanford and run the Prakash Lab at Department of Bioengineering at Stanford University. Foldscope community is at the heart of our Frugal Science movement - and I can not tell you how proud I am of this community and grassroots movement. Find our work here: http://prakashlab.stanford.edu

258posts

1177comments

41locations

I walked around tidal pools on the west coast, and stumbled upon a wriggling object in a tide pool. I put one of them on a glass slide and looked closer. To my wonder, it turned out to be a Polychaete worms – some of the most common segmented worms in the ocean. More than 13,000 species are known; and I am sure you have seen some beautiful photographs of these marine worms before (some of the relatives have scary names like the fireworm).
What’s fun is to actually look closer, and simple things start to become puzzling. Let’s watch this video of the dynamics of how the spines eject in and out of the worms body. What are those spines doing? How fast is that? What controls the spines? I am amazed with the speed of these spines. Next I will quantify how fast these things are moving. In the video, I slowed down a portion 10 times slower to show you how fast that movement is. Now if I had an iPhone6 coupled to my foldscope; I would have made a high-speed video. Maybe that is what I will do next.