This week, with the Rev Kevin Logan, Vicar of Christ Church, Accrington
MY pet worm's amazing. Settle to your Saturday takeaway of vermicelli, or whatever, and read on.
Its fascinating life-cycle begins under a frog's tongue. It climbs to the roof of the mouth, hangs about, eventually ejecting its own fertilised eggs, which are then digested by the host.
Excreted into the water, they hatch into baby worms with tiny beaks strong enough to break and enter the shell of a finger-nail-size ram's horn snail.
Halipegus - that's its Sunday name - feasts on snail's liver (how's the vermicelli?) and ends up back in the pond, where its tail sprouts tentacles to lure a water flea called Cyclops.
Amazingly, Halipegus coils like a spring in its own tail and awaits a nibble. The Cyclops flea opens its mouth and our worm launches itself down the gullet, through the intestinal walls to the safety of a body cavity.
This new mobile home becomes a fine meal for a dragonfly larvae which, in turn, gets eaten by a frog. Out pops our worm, crawls back up the gut and starts the lifecycle all over again.
It stretches the imagination to such an extent that you can't believe it could possibly have evolved, says worm boffin Professor Miriam Rothschild. There just has to be
a humorous designer somewhere, who has arranged the whole thing for his own amusement.
Could mindless chance produce such a phenomenon?
Or what about this month's caterpillars melting themselves down to become red admirals? More accidents?
How could blundering blind nature design a delicate guidance mechanism that allowed last week's oldest-ever recorded bird to fly a million miles over 50 years with pin-point accuracy?
I think the prof might have a point.
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