Mysterious sticky 'not-quite-eggs' and a troubled worm.

by Quia moderator

Those do look like eggs stuck to the vulva, especially note the motions around 10-12, it looks like one impacted egg, and the other egg is stuck to it. Sleuthing time! A little timeline of our troubled egg laying lady.

AWS0000wx0 Earlier video, an odd looking egg laying, it's practically transparent. This is as far back as I looked.

AWS0000wx1 When she leaves the 'egg' behind, there's a baby there, no egg. Live birth?

(She lays a few normal eggs here between these two videos)

AWS0000wx5 This is where the troubling eggs are laid. The start of this poor girl's problems!

AWS0000wx6 The orginal video, where you can see clearly the two eggs stuck to her side.

AWS0000wxa At 27, the two eggs unstick, at 29, she lays some more, difficult to count.

AWS0000wxb She does not seem happy! Very quick movements, which I'm anthropomorphizing as her trying to get the giant lump of eggs off her side. I don't know if they actually do this. 😃 Her eggs seem to be unusually 'sticky.' The two eggs that were freed in the last video remain stuck to the pile of eggs on her side, they unstick in the first few seconds. She ends this with a massive chunk of egg-stuff stuck to her vulva side, no eggs distinguishable but it all came from that mass laying in the previous video.

AWS0000wxc She drops off.. something, from the pileup. No egg, just an undefined blob.

AWS0000wxe An egg laid at 4, through the built up not-quite-egg-stuff. She twitches quite strongly when the egg is laid, not something I'm used to seeing.

AWS0000wxf Losing a big chunk of not-eggs. Probably loosened when she laid that last egg.

AWS0000wxg More of the not-eggs falling off, and look at how weirdly she bends!

AWS0000wxh Almost looking back to normal, still has a bulge that may be an impacted egg.

AWS0000wxn Another egg laid, but she still retains the weird bulge around the vulva. This is the end of any exciting behavior for this little worm, at least for a long while.

I've never see anything that's not an egg come out of a worm's vulva before, but whatever that mess was, when she was finally rid of it, there were no eggs in it, and she didn't leave behind any babies, either. Undeveloped eggs that were prematurely laid, or failed eggs? She does lay normal eggs before and after dropping that giant mess.

Posted March 23, 2015 11:13 PM