APROCEAN

 tardibabe

I love how cute planarians look with their eyes and their little ears! 🥺 This one is particularly gorgeous with its leopard patterns 😍 there’s also a white leech and a small water mite appearing in the video but they will both have their own spotlight soon 👀

Planarians are members of the phylum Platyhelminthes, which means flatworms in greek, and the class Turbellaria. Flatworms can measure from a couple of millimeters, like the one from the video, to several meters, especially in parasitic tapeworms. Parasitic worms aren’t very common in the Turbellaria class though, so there’s no worries with this cute little critter! This planarian is free-living and can be observed in freshwater habitats such as streams, lakes and spring pools!

Unlike leeches and earthworms, Planarians are unsegmented, lack respiratory and circulatory system and don’t possess an anus! This means that food and wastes arrive and are ejected by the same door 👀 Although, they do have a mouth, pharynx and some intestines. The intestines are visible in the video when the planarian decide to switch sides and swim on its back; they look like branches of a tree or even blood vessels! The pharynx is located on the middle of the ventral side and has the ability to evaginate when there’s some good food near. A good way to make them show us their pharynx is to add a bit of meat near them but I only had tofu and tempeh 😂

Planarians possess sense organs such as auricles, which are the small ear lobes on the side of the head, that are full of tactile and chemoreceptive cells. They also have eyespots acting as photoreceptors, statocysts used for equilibrium and rheoreceptors used to sense the direction of the water currents.

One classic characteristic of Turbellaria is the presence of many cilia on the epidermal layer. These cilia, aided by mucus secretion, are used for locomotion!