You don't want to find a Glycera dibranchiata at the bottom of your beach bucket. They are called bloodworms because of their translucent skin. The long and venomous worms are native to both coasts of North America and have four sharp fangs and a somewhat grumpy temperament.
The creatures are very protective of their turf, according to a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
The worms shoot out proboscis of strange construction when they are disgruntled.
If your head was a balloon, it would be sucked into your body. William Wonderly, a chemist at Santa Barbara who collaborated with Dr. Waite to study the creatures, said that when you want to eat, you inflate it and bite it.
The worms have an odd feature that is less obvious. Their fangs are made up of just three ingredients, including melanin, and they are hard to distinguish. 10 percent or so of the fangs are made of a tough material infused with copper that is made from bloodworms. The chemical transformation of the worms used to be a mystery.
The creatures rely on the third ingredient in the fangs to do it, according to a paper published Monday in the journal Matter. The finding shows how nature finds simple ways to build complex features and unlocks a biochemical secret of this unusual creature.
Dr. Wonderly said that a bloodworm's fangs grow out of a set of cells that function as Hoppers. The team looked at the proteins being used in the cells and found one that was a major component of the final product. They report in the new paper that this is a small amount of a very important part of the fang's assembly.
The scientists found that the reaction to create and recruit copper ion is caused by the protein. The copper is used to seal the whole thing together after it links melanin into polymers and assembles itself into a structure. Dr. Wonderly said that multitasking protein seems to steer away from the tendency to form into blobs in human hair and skin. That allows it to be a part of a lethal killing machine that hides in sand.
Some of the mysteries of the bloodworm are not solved, such as how copper is handled in the worm's body.
There is a huge question about how the copper gets concentrated in the jaws. They are hard to grow in the lab because they have a complicated spawning cycle.
The team is hoping to learn more about how the worms assemble this unusual polymer by tracing how the melanin is produced and how the worm builds it from precursors within its body.
There are so many things that nature has figured out how to do.
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