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b'This week we learn about some weird worms!\\n\\nFurther reading:\\n\\nOtherworldly Worms with Three Sexes Discovered in Mono Lake\\n\\nBizarre sea worm with regenerative butts named after Godzilla\'s monstrous nemesis\\n\\nUnderground giant glows in the dark but is rarely seen\\n\\nGiant Gippsland earthworm (you can listen to one gurgling through its burrow here too)\\n\\nFurther watching:\\n\\nA giant Gippsland earthworm\\n\\nGlowing earthworms (photo by Milton Cormier):\\n\\n\\n\\nThis sea worm\'s head is on the left, its many "butts" on the right [photo from article linked to above]:\\n\\n\\n\\nA North Auckland worm [photo from article linked to above]:\\n\\n\\n\\nA giant beach worm:\\n\\n\\n\\nShow transcript:\\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\\nThis week we continue Invertebrate August with a topic I almost saved for monster month in October. Let\\u2019s learn about some weird worms!\\nWe\\u2019ll start with a newly discovered worm that\\u2019s very tiny, and we\\u2019ll work our way up to larger worms.\\nMono Lake in California is a salty inland lake that probably started forming after a massive volcanic eruption about 760,000 years ago. The eruption left behind a crater called a caldera that slowly filled with water from rain and several creeks. But there\\u2019s no outlet from the lake\\u2014no river or even stream that carries water from the lake down to the ocean. As a result, the water stays where it is and over the centuries a lot of salts and other minerals have dissolved into the lake from the surrounding rocks. The water is three times as salty as the ocean and very alkaline.\\nNo fish live in the lake, but some extremophiles do. There\\u2019s a type of algae that often turns the water bright green, brine shrimp that eat the algae, some unusual flies that dive into the water encased in bubbles, birds that visit the lake and eat the brine shrimp and flies, and eight species of worms that have only been discovered recently. All the worms are weird, but one of them is really weird. It hasn\\u2019t been described yet so at the moment is just going by the name Auanema, since the research team thinks it probably belongs in that genus.\\nAuanema is microscopic and lives throughout the lake, which is unusual because the lake contains high levels of arsenic. You know, a DEADLY POISON. But the arsenic and the salt and the other factors that make the lake inhospitable to most life don\\u2019t bother the worms.\\nAuanema produces offspring that can have one of three sexes: hermaphrodites that can self-fertilize, and males and females that need each other to fertilize eggs. Researchers think that the males and females of the species help maintain genetic diversity while the hermaphrodites are able to colonize new environments, since they don\\u2019t need a mate to reproduce.\\nWhen some of the worms were brought to the laboratory for further study, they did just fine in normal lab conditions, without extreme levels of arsenic and so forth. That\\u2019s unusual, because generally extremophiles are so well adapted for their extreme environments that they can\\u2019t live anywhere else. But Auanema is just fine in a non-harsh environment. Not only that, but the team tested other species in the Auanema genus that aren\\u2019t extremophiles and discovered that even though they don\\u2019t live in water high in arsenic, they tolerate arsenic just as well as the newly discovered species.\\nThe team\\u2019s plan is to sequence Auanema\\u2019s genome to see if they can determine the genetic factors that confer such high resistance to arsenic.\\nNext, we go up in size from a teensy worm to another newly discovered worm, this one only about 4 inches long at most, or 10 cm. It\\u2019s a marine polychaete worm that lives inside sea sponges, although we don\\u2019t know yet if it\\u2019s parasitizing the sponge or if it confers some benefit to the sponge that makes this a symbiotic relationship. The worm was only discovered in 2019 near Japan and described in early 2022 as Ramisyllis kingghidorahi.\\nAlmost all worms known are shaped, well, like worms.'