HOME | DD

REP: Mantleworm — Description
The mantleworms are a strange group of marine creatures that lives exclusively as burrowers. Their most defining feature is the mantle, a hard, inflatable extension of the head, which is pushed into the sand and pumped up to create space for the following body. Mantleworms possess an invertable trunk that is usually hidden in a fold on the underside of the mantle; this trunk has many different shapes, depending on the diet. Detritivores usually either reduce their trunks and feed directly through the fold in the mantle or they will develop especially long trunks to sound and eat the sediment in their surroundings without having to move themselves, while predators will usually develop short, muscular trunks lined with teeth. Some extinct species were filter-feeders that extended their feathered trunks out of the sediment while their bodies remained buried.
Another defining trait are their hind ends that bud off into epitokes, which contain a set of reproductive organs, sensory feelers and a simple nervous system; the gut that runs through the epitoke-forming part of the body is closed when the epitoke falls off. To drop an epitoke the mantle worm will extend its rear end out of the sediment. Epitokes have the reproductive set of one gender and will find an epitoke of the opposite gender to mate with. Female epitokes will bury themselves after fertilisation and harden themselves into a capsule, where the eggs develop. Mantleworms range greatly in size from less than a centimeter to 40 cm in length. Due to their tolerance for low oxygen contents Mantleworms can be found almost anythere the soil is soft enough to dig; a few predatory species are even capable to enter anoxic zones and feed on sulphozoans.