I would guess the color might be a byproduct of some kind of compound that makes some acorn worms taste and smell bad. we have no idea.Ĭolor helps us identify them but certainly there is not enough light down where they live for anything to be able to see their colors. A lot of them have substantial pigmentation but what the function of that pigmentation is…. The colors of the other worms we are working on, known as the Torquaratoridae, are bright purple, bright pink, bright red, and there are also some white ones, brown ones and some really colorless ones that are almost transparent.

Q: Why is Glandiceps abyssicola bright yellow? abyssicola taken from a scientific paper printed in 1885. Delicate things are pretty unlikely to come up in any recognizable state, so we were actually lucky to have gotten these two worms in as good a shape as we did. The metal dredge drags across the bottom of the ocean and a chain knocks everything on the top layer into a net…not exactly a gentle collecting technique. Both were collected at about 5,000 meters down. They don’t have much musculature and no hard skeleton. Q: In both 18 deep-sea dredging collected only the forward half of each of these two worms. But then there’s this worm attached to it, so that kind of blows the whole idea that it resembles an acorn. Osborn: The proboscis looks like an acorn sticking off the worm’s front end and the collar that surrounds it looks like the cap of the acorn. Here, Osborn answers a few questions for about this mysterious deep-sea creature. One of the co-authors of the paper is Karen Osborn, worm specialist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. The rediscovery of this deep-sea acorn worm was recently announced with a detailed augmented description in the Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom. Glandiceps abyssicola (Images courtesy Karen Osborn)

Acorn worm