Wonders from Malaysian Borneo!
Location: Malaysian Borneo
August 12, 2011 9:09 pm
Hey Bug-people!
A challenge for you!
I took myself backpacking through Southeast Asia a while ago, and came back with some amazing pictures of bugs.
I’ve included three of what were to me the most fascinating and baffling varieties. Can you help me identify them?
Cheers!
Signature: Doug

Land Planarian

Hi Doug,
We really only like posting identification requests with a single species, or at most, members of the same family so that they would be archived together.  The orange and black wormlike creature is actually a Land Planarian or Flatworm.  We will try to research the species because that coloration is quite distinctive.  We quickly found a match on Flickriver that was identified as a species in the genus Bipalium. The website also contains this fascinating information:  “Terrestrial flatworms, land planarians or hammerhead worms whatever you call them they are simple yet interesting creatures. During the day they are hidden away from the sun and heat. But at night, at night when the temperature lowers, and the humidity spikes, these predators voraciously feed on annelids. Their diet comprises mainly of earthworms, following their slimy trails until they fall upon and devour them. However they also eat insect larvae, slugs and are not above a little cannibalism. They feed by entwining themselves around their prey and entrapping it in a sticky mucous. It then proceeds to evert its pharynx onto the prey and secrete digestive enzymes, taking up the partially digested food particles into the gastrovascular cavity. Where they can then be digested and properly absorbed in the intestinal epithelia.
Land planarians move on a film of mucous secreted onto a ventral strip of closely spaced, powerful cilia (creeping sole). They usually follow plants for ease of movement and are able to lower themselves down to the earth on a string of mucous.
The flatworm body can reproduce asexually, reproducing an entirely new organism by breaking off from the parent organism. Only the posterior end has this capability as the front end houses nerve ganglia and organs vital to survival. However this would lead to a genetically homogenous population making it prone to disease and unstable. Therefore flatworms also reproduce sexually. Like the earthworms on which they feed, they are hermaphroditic, having both male and female sexual organs. In fact the entire body is very metabolically flexible since during lean times they are able to digest reproductive organs and most other cells to keep themselves alive.
Flatworms come in a variety of beautiful colours to display their aposematism. In addition to their mucosal secretions, they may have toxins to deter predators. In this way, their most fearsome predators are other flatworms.”

Wow!  I guess everything’s bigger on Borneo, because that larval Firefly was  nearly three inches long!
Thanks for that. The info about the flatworm was particularly fascinating.
Doug

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White worm ? Reminder )
June 20, 2011 10:20 PM
Sir,
Thanks a lot for the painstaking efforts for keeping the site authentic.
Here is another one from my place, Kerala India.
This is a white earthworm(?) found near a paddy field in murky waters. It measured almost 32 cm and the girth would be 2 cm.
what would be this ?
Warm regards
Ibrahim TMC
Kasargod- Kerala

White Worm

Dear Ibrahim,
We really love your photo using the umbrella to cast a shadow and eliminate glare.  We have no idea what this White Worm is and we will need to do some research.  We can’t help but to wonder if it spends its life in dark places so it doesn’t need pigmentation.  Our sense of the macabre just kicked in and we can’t help but to wonder if this might be some human parasite.

White Worm

We just had this incredible desire to read Bram Stoker’s Lair of the White Worm, and it seems the entire text is available online.  We like this larger type version even better, though we would much rather read the book.

White Worm

Dear Daniel Sir,
Your efforts were painstaking to identify the white worm.
My friend from the Zoological Survey of India, Calicut is quite sure that it is an earthworm. They call it Dravida Nilamburiansis. Further he informed me that it would measure up to a meter in length.Earlier thought it was endemic to place called Nilambur, in Kerala India.
Warm regards,
Ibrahim TMC

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description of worm, have dreams of them
January 7, 2011 10:23 pm
I keep having this same dream over and over.  In it there is a worm with either a red or orange head, four white segments behind, and on the first and last white segments, there are two black legs.  They come burrowing out of the person’s body, and they come out singly, but there is a lot of them.  What could these worms be?
Signature: Daniel

Is the Tetrio Sphinx the source of the Red Headed Dream Worm?

Dear Daniel,
WE are not in the business of dream interpretation, but we do have enough knowledge to know that dreams are a combination of many real life experiences and sensory data that are modified by psychological impulses including fears and desires.  Perhaps you have a fear of parasites.  There are numerous worms that can be found inside humans, including Tapeworms.  There are also some internal parasites that are insects like the Human Bot Fly.  There are also many somewhat wormlike insects with red heads that we have in our archives including the Tetrio Sphinx Caterpillar, a Walkingstick from Ecuador, the Red Headed Centipede, the Red Headed Pine Sawfly Larva and the Azalea Caterpillar.  We cannot say for certain that your dream worm does not exist, but since you are unable to send us an image of what is going on inside your head, we are going to have to leave it as unidentified.

Might the Red Headed Centipede cause Nightmares?

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