Researchers have shed light on the unexpectedly fascinating mating dance of a type of marine worm called Platynereis dumerilii.
In the footage, one marine worm shimmies across the seabed while another loop-the-loops through the water like it’s on a rollercoaster.
“Responding to phases of the lunar cycle, males and females will rise up in the water column to mate,” Nipam Patel, director at the Marine Biological Laboratory, who shared the video of the marine worms performing a mating dance.
The two worms then tumble around together in a slightly frenetic game of Ring a Ring o' Roses. Rather than ‘all falling down’ at the end, they can be seen rocketing off into the water with eggs and sperm floating around them, like snow.
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“As shown in this video, the larger females will swim in small circles, with the smaller males darting around them, releasing eggs and sperm as they go,” Nipam says on LinkedIn.
Once fertilised, the eggs settle on the substrate and start their development. It takes just a few days before the free-swimming larvae hatch.
Image and video credits: Video of adults by BioQuest Studios at the Marine Biological Laboratory; animals provided by B. Duygu Ozpolat; confocal imaged on a Zeiss LSM700 by Kathryn McClelland, Nathan Kenny and Sophie Miller, PhD; photos on the dock by Scott Applebaum
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