Tubeworms live in the sea, some in shallow water and some deep on the seabed around hydrothermal vents.
When they are larvae they can move around, but once they are adults, with their tails anchored to the spot they have chosen, they are fixed to that spot for the rest of their lives.
It would be tiring to stand on end as a worm, waiting patiently with their feathery plumes to eat tiny plankton, bacteria, and organic detritus as it floats by.
So they construct a tube of minerals around their bodies so they can stand up supported rather than flopping down under their own weight. And they stand in little forests of tube worms with just their feathery plumes moving free at the top end to catch passing food, for they have no mouths or stomachs, and just stand in their tubes waiting patiently.
Deep sea tube worms that live near hydrothermal vents use their plumes to absorb oxygen, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen sulfide from the water around the vents.
Inside the worms are billions of bacteria and they absorb the oxygen, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen sulfide to produce sugars and amino acids to feed themselves.
That incidentally feeds the tube worms, and that is how tube worms can live without a stomach to process food.
When I was out with landscape photographer Matt Oliver a couple of days ago, we went to a disused quarry abandoned a century ago. Nature has come back to claim its own, and the black trunks of the birch trees in the quarry bottom reminded me of a forest of tube worms.
And when I think about it, trees truly are similar to the worms. First they are young spoors traveling in the wind and then they anchor themselves in the ground and grow upwards and become solidified in place, waiting patiently for the sun and the air and the ground to feed them.
The Quarry
When the market for millstones disappeared and the quarry was abandoned, the unwanted millstones were left behind. A century later they are dotted around the quarry bottom, and some – like here – in little graveyards of millstone grit millstones.
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