Thought to have existed since the Cretaceous, more than 30 species of Osedax – ‘bone devourers’ or zombie worms – feast on whale skeletons
was discovered near a hydrothermal vent at a depth of more than 2,000 metres in the Arctic, and named in 2020 after the Norse god Loki’s son, Fenris the wolf.
The bone-eating worm ranges in size from the length of a little finger to smaller than an eyelash. Those visible to the naked eye are usually females. Males are mostly tiny and don’t eat bones. They live in “harems” of tens or hundreds inside a female’s mucous tube, and wait for her eggs to emerge so they can immediately fertilise them.
All the energy these diminutive males get comes from their mothers via their egg yolks. Once they have run down that energy store, they die. “We called them kamikaze males,” says Robert Vrijenhoek, retired evolutionary biologist from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, California, who was also part of the originalseen in the water with feathery tendrils coming from its head and a clump of roots at the other end.
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