Don't Puke

Since Allison posted about a lion dog, I thought I'd put up a picture of another freak of nature: one of the gross worms we saw yesterday.

We were walking along a National Park dirt road and we saw this in the puddle:


It's hard to tell what's going on there. Jesse had to stand back a bit to get the whole thing in the picture. Some kind of worm was in the puddle, but it's hard to see because it had been there for a while--it had turned all translucent. The black stuff must have been stuff it was digesting. If you click on the picture you can see footprints to the right of the worm in the dirt, and that will give you some kind of scale. It was at least fifteen feet long (it's doubled up on itself), but it was also all coiled up, too, so it was probably nearer twenty feet. When we walked back down the road we passed maybe five or six more of these nasties, all in puddles.

I found a site talking about earth worms that can grow up to 15 feet long in Australia, but this is much longer than that. I'm going to go back and collect one in a bottle (or make Jesse do it) and bring it to the university and have them tell me what it is. Has anyone seen anything like this? Thinking about it is starting to make me nauseous....