{"id":388,"date":"2010-06-11T16:26:02","date_gmt":"2010-06-11T20:26:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.biodiversityinfocus.com\/blog\/?p=388"},"modified":"2010-06-11T16:26:02","modified_gmt":"2010-06-11T20:26:02","slug":"the-other-hammerhead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.biodiversityinfocus.com\/blog\/2010\/06\/11\/the-other-hammerhead\/","title":{"rendered":"The other Hammerhead"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This morning, undergraduate worker and entomologist-in-training Stephen Luk<\/a> brought in a special little creature that he found in his backyard (click to enlarge):<\/p>\n


\n<\/a>\"Hammerhead<\/a><\/p>\n

Neat, but what is it you ask? It’s a hammerhead flatworm (Bipaliidae) which he found under some bark. Although I’m not 100% confident about what species it is, I’m fairly certain it is the introduced Bipalium adventitium<\/em>. These little carnivores are predators of another introduced invertebrate, earthworms. Dindal (1970) reported that once Bipalium <\/em>latches onto its prey, it sucks away with its pharynx (mouth-like structure) and liquefies large sections of the earthworms integument before ingesting its victim section by section.<\/p>\n

\"Hammerhead<\/a><\/p>\n

This individual was about a 1.5 cm long and constantly on the move, making for a tricky photo shoot! The first image was taken with only the Nikon 105mm VR lens and SB-800 speedlight, but to gain some added magnification I shot the remaining images with extension tubes. Generally when I’m shooting macro subjects with limited depth of field, I strive to have the eyes in focus to allow the viewer to “connect” with the subject. But what about a creature that doesn’t have eyes in the traditional sense? Well, I went for what I believe are light-sensing sensilli (larger crop of above photo):<\/p>\n

\"Close<\/a><\/p>\n

It took quite a few tries to get a good shot with the small depth of field provided by the extension tubes, but it was worth the effort to see such a special little invert up close and personal!<\/p>\n

\"Biparium<\/a><\/p>\n

References: Dindal, D. L. 1970. Feeding Behavior of a Terrestrial Turbellarian Bipalium adventitium<\/em>. American Midland Naturalist 83 (2): 635-637
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Feeding Behavior of a Terrestrial Turbellarian Bipalium adventitium<\/h1>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This morning, undergraduate worker and entomologist-in-training Stephen Luk brought in a special little creature that he found in his backyard (click to enlarge): Neat, but what is it you ask? It’s a hammerhead flatworm (Bipaliidae) which he found under some bark. Although I’m not 100% confident about what species it is, I’m fairly certain it […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[75,47,17],"tags":[101,103,102,100],"class_list":["post-388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biology","category-nature","category-photography","tag-bipaliidae","tag-bipalium","tag-flatworm","tag-turbellaria","category-75-id","category-47-id","category-17-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.biodiversityinfocus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.biodiversityinfocus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.biodiversityinfocus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.biodiversityinfocus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.biodiversityinfocus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=388"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.biodiversityinfocus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":396,"href":"http:\/\/www.biodiversityinfocus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388\/revisions\/396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.biodiversityinfocus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.biodiversityinfocus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.biodiversityinfocus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}