So today was the start of the last week of Marine Invert Taxonomy and today's session was ALL about marine polychaete worms. Identifying some of them is incredibly difficult and you need a large helping of patience to get through it. The worms above can be extremely small with about 20-25 fitting comfortably in the area the size of my pinky fingernail! These ones, however, were on a piece of Fucus seaweed. They are supposedly the calcareous tubeworm Spirorbis spirorbis, but the only way to know that for certain is to kill them and extract the worm out of its tube to look at its body features. I was more interested in watching their feeding behaviour under a microscope rather than inflicting death upon a really cool critter!
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