Giant Tube Worm
Giant tube worms, Riftia pachyptila, are marine invertebrates in the phylum Annelida (formerly grouped in phylum Pogonophora and Vestimentifera) related to tube worms commonly found in the intertidal and pelagic zones. Riftia pachyptila lives over a mile deep, and up to several miles deep, on the floor of the Pacific Ocean near black smokers, and it can tolerate extremely high hydrogen sulfide levels. These worms can reach a length of 2.4 m (7 ft 10 in).
The common name "giant tube worm" is however also applied to the largest living species of shipworm, Kuphus polythalamia, which despite the name "worm" is a bivalve mollusc, not an annelid.
Read more about Giant Tube Worm: Body Structure, Energy and Nutrient Source, Reproduction, Growth Rate and Age
Famous quotes containing the words giant, tube and/or worm:
“Long ago the country bore the country-town and nourished it with her best blood. Now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited waste of country.”
—Oswald Spengler (1880–1936)
“One of the great natural phenomena is the way in which a tube of toothpaste suddenly empties itself when it hears that you are planning a trip, so that when you come to pack it is just a twisted shell of its former self, with not even a cubic millimeter left to be squeezed out.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“Speak, then, my Beauty, to this dire putrescence,
To the worm that shall kiss your proud estate,
That I have kept the divine form and the essence
Of my festered loves inviolate!”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)