More annelid than anaconda

This post has been updated to reflect that this worm should be called the Sand Striker. Please refer to the following post in regards to the change https://www.deepseanews.com/?p=59047

Once upon a time in 1993, when I was imbibing my sophomore year at college in Australia – drinking in the knowledge, so to speak – I heard tell of a horrific crime, one that struck fear into the hearts and sub-heart-areas of men everywhere.  Accompanied by the essential preface “Only in America…”, men whispered and women snickered about a suburban woman, Lorena Bobbitt, who had taken to her husband’s genitalia with a Ginsu knife and later discarded the detached digit out the window of her car (rumour has it, directly into the windshield of a car coming the other way).  Soon enough just the name Bobbitt become synonymous with penile amputation, even in Brisbane, about as far from Mannassas Virginia as it’s possible to be (a reassuring thought for the male residents of Queensland’s capital, I can tell you).  If the third digit in your birth year is an 8 or higher, you probably have no idea what I mean, but just trust me, those were dark dark times…

But Bobbitt has another homonymous meaning, more annelid than anaconda, more polychaete than pajama python.  It’s the common name for a truly remarkable worm: Eunice aphroditois, the Sand Striker.  It’s easy to think E. aphroditois was named by someone with a (somewhat blue) sense of humour, and some have done so,  but the spelling suggests that the names are not related and – rather frustratingly – I have not been able to confirm the origins of the name, at least not without attracting the attention of our IT staff…  Regardless of where the common name comes from, the animal itself is a fantastic critter, one of the largest of all polychaetes (reaching 3 meters in length and thick as a bratwurst), with a colourful cuticle and armed with a pair of heavily toothed jaws that command respect, and not just of the knee-crossing variety.

In 2009, the Blue Reef Aquarium in the UK discovered a truly enormous one of these bad boys in one of their exhibits after a series of severed carcasses were found floating in the tank.  They nicknamed him Barry, and here he is…

Sand Strikers‘s are ambush predators.  They hang around sticking out the sand like the one above, just waiting for some hapless victim to come close enough to trigger their sensitive peri-oral tentacles and then slam!

As we go into this weekend, griping about another hard work week in the books, just be glad you’re neither John Wayne Bobbitt, nor a hapless Philippine goatfish. And next time you’re doing the stingray shuffle across a beach or reef flat, just consider that, while you may be scaring away the rays with ruthless efficiency, you’re doing it using what must be the optimal Sand Striker finding strategy in existence, and wiggly pink toes are just about ideal size for those hair-trigger jaws…