It is indeed one species, with remarkable camouflage abilities !!! Please take a moment to marvel at their top level mimicry skills 🪱 💯 And there is a ton more research to do to figure out how they do this, if they can change color when they switch hosts and so on!!

Because they have different colors and live on different hosts we suspected they could belong to different species, or perhaps be on their way to becoming different species… so we looked at the similarity in their DNA to check… 🧬🧬🧬and DNA proved our hypothesis wrong!

Check out their super cute faces! Some color morph even match the aspect of sand grains on their host!

In coral reefs there is a very cool species of scale worms that lives on sea cucumbers! 🌊🥒 They change colors according to the sea cucumbers they are living on.🎨

It’s not #WormWednesday but check out those beautiful drawings of echiurians and sipunculans drawn by Ikeda, from 1904!! Also just saying « I don’t know » was done so elegantly. Reading old taxonomy papers is so so cool!!

Hey! I don’t see any worms clearly out on these ones, but we can see the burrows openings! This is harder to see in this coral though

Oulala! This is the first official iNaturalist entry of Haplosyllis anthogorgicola, and the species is now included in their database🪱🪱🪱 So happy! Thanks to the photographer @cassandroid.substack.com ! @inaturalist.bsky.social @lauramacrina.bsky.social

Hey, thanks for reaching out this is super cool!!! Not sure i saw your images before if you uploaded them recently. But I can see the worms on you images, take a look!!

I’m on blue sky! Blue skies of DC for my first post!