This is a rather ugly picture since the worm decided to crawl up the un-cleaned and scratched corner of my aquarium. I was taking another picture and noticed he was opening his mouth and scraping the glass. I had no idea they had that large a mouth. It’s too bad it’s so dirty, but I suppose if the glass was clean he never would have tried to scrape it, and I never would have taken the picture. This particular worm can stretch up to about 10 inches. Has anyone else seen a bristle worm open it’s mouth like that?
Bristle Worm Mouth
- Thread starter Wampatom
- Start date
I have been watching the worm, or possibly similar worms, and have attached two more pictures. One shows it crawling near a mushroom. It does not seem to hurt them or anything else of value in the tank. The second picture shows it all scrunched up. I think the blue color comes from reflection of the actinic bulbs. The skin seems reflective and so picks up the color of neighboring items. The orange color is from a colt coral.
The most amazing thing is it can eat from the surface of the water. It crawls up my overflow and positions itself so it can eat fish food from the water surface. It opens it’s mouth and gobbles the food. Because the mouth opening is parallel to the water surface I can’t see exactly how it eats. This seems like a learned behavior to me. I can’t imagine worms eating from the ocean surface. Ahhh.
They have been in my tank for 5 years and I have never noticed this kind of behavior before. From the top they seem to have a small head, and so I assumed, a small mouth. I guess not.
The most amazing thing is it can eat from the surface of the water. It crawls up my overflow and positions itself so it can eat fish food from the water surface. It opens it’s mouth and gobbles the food. Because the mouth opening is parallel to the water surface I can’t see exactly how it eats. This seems like a learned behavior to me. I can’t imagine worms eating from the ocean surface. Ahhh.
They have been in my tank for 5 years and I have never noticed this kind of behavior before. From the top they seem to have a small head, and so I assumed, a small mouth. I guess not.
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