Bone Eating Snot Flower

From DeHavilland...

A new species of zombie worm has been discovered that eats the bones of dead whales. The pink Osedax mucofloris, which means bone-eating snot flower, was discovered feeding off the carcass of a Minke whale by a joint UK-Swedish team. The base of the flower-like worm goes into the bone, like a root system, taking nutrients and oils from it and resembles a ball of mucus, or snot. This part of the worm, which has no eyes or gut, is thought to be a defence mechanism. During the experiment the Minke whale was placed at a depth of 125m and observed to see what would occur. First the flesh was stripped from the bones by hagfish and then the snot flowers moved in to devour the bones. A further mystery surrounding the worm is that only females have been found, but in similar Pacific varieties the male actually lives inside the female existing only to fertilise eggs. The findings of the team from the Swedish Tjarno Marine Laboratory and the Natural History Museum were published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. "The evidence presented here of a potentially global clade of bone-eating worms, hitherto unknown except from a single deep-sea region, is surprising given that whale bones have been routinely trawled up on the shelf and slope by fishermen, and in some cases examined by scientists who did not report Osedax-like worms," the study's authors, led by Adrian Glover, said. They added: "We suggest that careful, microscopic examination of whale bones freshly recovered from the seafloor may reveal that Osedax is widespread in the oceans."