Pigbutt Worm
How do you compile a list of peculiar marine life and leave out the Pigbutt Worm, which has a real name? You can call it by its alternative term, "flying buttocks," if that sounds too impolite for you. The pigbutt worm, discovered in 2007, is a worm, but it's round, the size of a hazelnut, and yes, it resembles a flying butt. To complete the picture in your head, it floats around 3,000 to 4,000 feet below the surface, and their small mouths are covered with mucus.
This free-floating bum is unique among the worm species that are closely related to the pigbutt because nearly all of them dwell in tubes. They are said to float around in clouds of trash and minute pieces of bio-matter, eating whatever adheres to their mouth mucous.
The body of the worm is divided into segments, however the center segments are greatly inflated, giving the creature a rounded appearance. These morphological traits are specific to chaetopterids only. The specimens discovered so far have not been identified as adult or larval forms. It is likely that the individuals identified were actually larva that had simply been unable to settle in an adequate benthic habitat for their species, as chaetopterid worms do not spend a specified period of time as planktonic larva.
However, all currently known species of chaetopterid adults prefer to dwell in the benthic environment, and they do so by living in parchment-like tubes on the sea floor. Their remarkable size (five to ten times larger than any known chaetopterid larvae) would indicate they were adults. A phylogenetic tree made from the mitochondrial and ribosomal DNA sequences of twelve different Chaetopteridae worms revealed that they are most closely related to other worms of the genus Chaetopterus. Comparison of larval morphology has shown that the specimens have a close relationship to either genus Chaetopterus or genus Mesochaetopterus.
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Annelida
Class: Polychaeta
Order: Canalipalpata
Family: Chaetopteridae
Genus: Chaetopterus
Species: C. pugaporcinus
