Bootlace Worm

• A specimen washed up on a Scottish beach in 1864 was measured at some fifty-five metres, which makes it the longest animal ever recorded, though its body stretches so much that the figure is disputed.
• It hunts with a proboscis, separate from the gut, that it shoots out from its head and that wraps around or pierces the prey.
• Its mucus contains powerful toxins, among them anabaseine, a compound that has been studied as a basis for neurological drugs and insecticides.
• It is considered the longest animal in the world. Ordinary specimens measure between 5 and 15 metres, 30-metre ones are known, and there is a record of 55, longer than an Olympic swimming pool.
• The record is disputed: it is extraordinarily elastic and reaches those lengths only fully stretched. Its width, by contrast, never exceeds a centimetre.
• Its mucus is the most toxic animal compound found in Sweden. When irritated it releases large amounts of thick slime loaded with peptide neurotoxins.
• Those toxins, named alpha-nemertides, block invertebrate sodium channels. The main one kills green crabs at a microgram per kilo, and cockroaches and varroa mites as well.
• That is why they are being investigated as agricultural insecticides: they are functional relatives of the cone snails' toxins.
• It hunts with an eversible proboscis that it shoots out to seize prey, the defining feature of the ribbon worm phylum.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - no rigid skeleton (hydrostatic skeleton)

Habitat and environment

Under stones and among algae in the intertidal and subtidal of the north-eastern Atlantic

Sources consulted: Wikipedia (es): Lineus longissimus