Fascinating Flatworms
I managed to make Cnidaria boring in 101 on Monday (no, Abby, I don't have any idea how that's possible, but I did) so I made up for it by telling fascinating stories of platyhelminthes today. I'm not making that up. Somehow I managed to make flatworms more interesting than corals. Teaching is a strange business.
4 comments:
Well, I don't know what happened with the Cnidaria lecture (everybody has an off day now and then), but I've always thought platyhelminths were really cool. Don't some get up to 2 feet or more in the tropics? Daphne told me once that there were some large, colorful ones in the vicinity of Lawrence. I REALLY wanted to find one of those but I never did. So tell us some of your great stories...
Sigh. So I won't expect any new cnidarian biologists from your class, right? Oh well, that's how things go sometimes.
In any case, flatworms are pretty interesting themselves. Anna, I don't know about 2 feet, but it is true that some of the polyclads can certaintly be several inches (particularly in the tropics).
I was going to be ornery and say - "plants are cooler anyway" but I really love inverts as well. And with worms, there is always the fascinating grossout factors.
Plus the fact you can make 10-headed planaria. That is weird.
We just talked about transcription in my class today. (Which I happen to think is really cool)
I didn't even talk about the ten-headed planaria (and our two headed died-- everything divided survived, the few partially cut died). I showed them the double penised poly-clad worms trying to stab each other. Then I spoke about metacestodes in the brain.
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