The ocean is home to many weird and wonderful creatures.
From the phallic ‘penis worm’ to the translucent barreleye fish – there’s been no shortage of new discoveries beneath the waves over the last year.
And now, yet another creepy critter has joined the ranks of the newly discovered.
The King Ghidorah branching worm has been discovered in Japan, much to the excitement of researchers.
They’ve named the rare find after King Ghidorah, Godzilla’s nemesis, who has the power to regrow his multiple heads.
The monster’s worm counterpart has a similar superpower, but for the opposite ends of its branching bodies.
The creature is made of hundreds of aqueous anuses that are spread across tendril-like branches that protrude from a singular head.
While not directly exposed to the ocean, the King Ghidorah worm instead shelters within a cosy sea sponge to keep warm.
Its heads sit within the main area of the sponge, while its many rear ends stretch and grow through the sponge’s narrow canalways.
Experts reckon that the bodies branch out in strange ways to “explore” the insides of their host.
Dr Maite Aguado, from the University of Göttingen in Germany, documented the creature for the first time along with colleagues from around the world, including Japan, Australia and Spain.
She said: ‘It has one head, usually in the most basal inner part of the sponge, and a huge branching body, with multiple branches inside the labyrinth canal system of the sponge.
‘The posterior ends – each with an anus – can go out through the sponge pores.
‘The animals can develop thousands of branches.”
Dr Aguado’s inspiration for the creature’s name had come from an in-flight film on a journey home from a field trip to Japan.
She said: ‘I was still not sure if the Japanese branching worm was a new species or not.
‘I saw the last Godzilla film where King Ghidorah appears.
‘I thought “what an animal! If the Japanese Ramisyllis ends up being a new species, we will name it after him”.’
This third species is particularly interesting due to its size – it would measure in at a massive 98ft long if each brach was placed one after another.
Dr Aguado said: ‘They reach a huge size compared with other syllids, which usually measure from some millimetres to a few centimetres.
‘In Ramisyllis multicaudata, the closest relative from Australia, we have estimated that they may reach 30m (98ft) long if we were able to put all branches linearly placed one after another.’
What the worm eats is still under investigation, but the mystery of how they reproduce has been solved.
Sperm and eggs fuse in each of the worm’s many behinds to create a ‘stolon’ which then detaches and floats away to find a stolon of the opposite sex.
The new species is related to the Ramisyllis multicaudata, which was first discovered in 2006, and the Syllis Ramosa, which was found in the Philippines in 1879.
Dr Aguado and her colleagues published their findings in the journal Organisms Diversity & Evolution.
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