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Posted on 11/11/2025 7:23:26 AM PST by DallasBiff
"Don't kill it, don't squish it, don't cut it up," Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller warned residents via NBC as a toxic flatworm spreads across North Texas.
While this invasive species has been in the US for years, the state's fatally heavy rains, fueled by climate change, are enabling the hammerhead flatworm (Bipalium kewense) to thrive and spread.
This brown and black-striped, flattened land planarian with a distinctive half-moon-shaped head can reach lengths of up to 40 cm (15.7 inches). Like many flatworm species, it can regenerate a whole new worm from slices of itself.
Decapitating the worm will only help it multiply.
(Excerpt) Read more at yahoo.com ...
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And what happen if I touch one?
Liberals
So nuke it from orbit?
Burn them to ash.
I haven’t seen any here in Dallas yet
But I damn sure will not be putting any in bags in my freezer.
Me too....what a steaming load. SMH
No, they are not insects. It is a flatworm, a much more primitive creature.
Because they are more primitive creatures. So they don’t have many specialised parts
Or an ounce of salt.
I can no longer sit back and allow hammerhead worm infiltration, worm wriggling, worm terrain subversion and the international Viet Cong hammerhead worm conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
Your Commie Viet Cong worm has no regard for human life, not even its own.
Arc Lite them, hook them, drown them. Bomb them back to the Stone Age.
They secrete neurotoxins. Not dangerous, but very irritating. Definitely wouldn’t recommend ingesting any of it.
They don’t have many. Amphibians, some birds .... even other hammerhead worms. That’s about it.
Nope. As usually used in science today, “worm” generally refers to any long, legless, boneless animal but ONLY if it’s not merely a larval form and ONLY if it hasn’t reverted to that form from some other previous, more complex seeming organism. Historically, these limits didn’t apply; snakes were considered “wyrms,” and many insect larvae are still colloquially called “worms” such as glow-worms, inch-worms, etc.
Generally speaking, “earthworms” and other “segmented worms” are “annelids,” which include leaches and are a sister group to molluscs. “Flatworms” are largely unrelated, and consist of marine and parasitic worms. “Roundworms” are very diverse, and are a sister group to arthropods, which include insects; arachnics like spiders; centipedes; crustaceans like crabs and shrimp, and “velvet worms” which are sort of like shell-less arthropods.
That makes sense. I expect mammals are more complex than worms.
From my chair, it’s better to have them in N Texas than in N Alabama. :)
Because they are more primitive creatures. So they don’t have many specialised parts
Far more.
Note that “worms” like earthworms or maggots are utterly different from flatworms.
Flatworms are acoelomate (lacking a body cavity) and triploblastic (three germ layers: ectoderm, mesoderm, endoderm), but their body plan is rudimentary. They have a gastrovascular cavity for digestion (no true anus), protonephridia for excretion/osmoregulation, and lack dedicated circulatory or respiratory systems—relying on diffusion for gas exchange and nutrient transport.
Insects, in contrast, are coelomate arthropods with a segmented body, exoskeleton (chitin-based), jointed appendages, and tagmatization (head, thorax, abdomen). They possess an open circulatory system (hemolymph), tracheal tubes for respiration.
Flatworms have a basic centralized nervous system (CNS) with a bilobed “brain” (cephalic ganglion) containing several thousand neurons, two ventral nerve cords, and peripheral nerves for sensory input (e.g., touch, chemoreception via eyespots.
Neuron counts in insects range from ~100,000–200,000 in fruit flies to ~1 million in cockroaches or bees, enabling complex behaviors such as social coordination, navigation, and associative learning. Quantitatively, insects have 50–200 times more neurons than flatworms (which have ~5,000–20,000 neurons total)
Mammals are coelomate, triploblastic vertebrates with a vertebral column, endoskeleton, and highly differentiated organ systems.
Neuron counts are vast: mice have ~70 million, humans ~86 billion. This enables abstract thinking, social behavior, and tool use. Flatworms’ simple CNS pales in comparison, with mammals having 10,000–10,000,000 times more neurons (~5,000–20,000 in flatworms).
The comparison between a flwtworm, insct and human is like a stone carved wheel compared to a bicycle to a F1 race car
I take it you think E.O. Wilson was a fraud. His estimate was that 600 species have been extirpated in the US because of exotics. Even if he were wildly wrong it would refute what he said.
I have a more direct way of explaining this from my own personal experience. Environmentalists are abetting a mass extinction event, sight unseen and particularly among insects.
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