Stays Long at Meals.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20476, 30 November 1934, Page 6

Stays Long at Meals.

Nature Notes

By

James Drummond, F.L.S.. F.Z.S.

A FLAT WORM accidentally introduced into New Zealand, Bipalium kewense, is a cosmopolitan. Its native country is unknown, but it has distributed itself so widely with plants and soil that almost the whole world now is its home. It is ribbony, usually from six inches to nine inches long, but may be eighteen inches when fully extended. It has an axe-shaped head, on whose margin there are eyes. With its head raised slightly above the ground, it goes forward by peculiar sinuous movements, pursuing earthworms, insects, wood-lice and other prey, not gulping its food, but spinning out a meal from an hour to five hours. -After that it may go for a long time without seeking food. Its skin is equipped with microscopical bent whiplike rods, each with a slender thread at one end. If it is irritated, it shoots out the rods, apparently as a means of offence, feeble against big enemies, but effective against small ones. The behaviour of such lowly creatures as flatworms is a fascinating study, difficult and complicated, already a serious phase of science, but not yet carried far. It is recognised that knowledge of their impulses and instincts, of how they act, and why, is more important than collecting and recording specimens. The slight knowledge available seems to disclose a great gulf separating lowly creatures from the highest. The difference is amusingly explained by Mr Raymond Pearl in a paper on the movements "of flatworms in “ The Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science,” a severely scientific publication. lie states that if a man was stimulated in the same way as a flat worm, whenever he saw or smelt food he would have to go to it and eat it; whenever he touched water he would have to take a bath, and perhaps drink until he could hold no more; during the day he would have to move always in a definite direction in reference to the sun.