The bone-eating snot-flower worm (or Osedax mucofloris if you wanna get prissy) was just discovered less than a decade ago, on the ocean floor — and it’s hella weird. For starters, 600 or more males can compete for each female. (AW yeah!) Plus, it looks like a fluffy pink cloud. Well, a cloud with a giant dick blossoming out of it:
Natural History Museum London, Alamy
That’s right: Bone worms don’t have mouths, guts, or buttholes, but they DO have dicks on their heads! (That makes it easier to fertilize the females’ eggs.) “It’s an extreme example of males being reduced to simply a bag of sperm,” says Adrian Glover, a marine biologist with London’s Natural History Museum. As opposed to a less-extreme example, like a bad Jennifer Aniston movie.
When they’re not fending off dick-headed suitors, females are shooting out acid to melt whale bones and even steak bones that were tossed overboard — they aren’t picky. The bone-eating dick-headed snot-flower worm will probably eat YOUR bones if you aren’t careful.
With all these quirks, it’s probably good the bone worm can hang out in relative obscurity on the sea floor, rather than be subjected to, say, high school — where a dick on your face is the least of your worries.
