They attach themselves to the crayfish with their surprisingly strong sucker, usually under the tail and use their finger-like tentacles to capture food. While these curious little worms do look a bit like a disembodied hand or Thing from the Addams Family, they’re nothing to be afraid of. There are only two native Temnosewellia species in southern Western Australia, but on the east coast, however, there are >30 known species, some of which have been found in only a single tributary or on a single species of crayfish. This particular species is most likely Temnosewellia minor a worm that is native to New South Wales and Victoria but was introduced into Western Australia and around the world when yabby farming took off, sometime after the 1960s. They are known to attach to freshwater crustaceans, particularly crayfish, and can be found around the world. Unlike the free-living flatworms, the temnocephalids have a sucker located on the underside of the body. Known as temnocephalids, these belong to a group of mostly free-living, non-parasitic flatworms known as the rhabdocoel turbellarians. Fearing some kind of parasitic invasion she brought them to the Museum for identification. We recently had a phone call from a curious citizen, Andrea Davy, who had noticed that the yabbies and marron in one of her ponds were crawling with some very strange animals. Andrew Hosie's blog | Created 10 years ago
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