At first, I thought it was a smooth-skinned sea cucumber in the genus Paracaudina, which emerge at times to flounder on soft substrates before resuming their quest for buried pleasure. The impression was reinforced by the creature's epidermal flexibility, which recall the ability of many holothurians to manipulate the viscosity of their tissue. The creature, found near the base of a seawall that shields Changi from its coastal past, was clad in light mauve with pale longitudinal stripes, and responded to touch by switching from rubbery contortions to a turgid reproach. But instead of a ring of tentacles, the anterior end of the animal bore an elongated shovel of a tool, its edges curved like an in-rolled tongue and bordering a gutter with an open, truncate tip.
This prostomium, which is covered with sticky mucus and richly ciliated, is usually directed ventrally to rake in and funnel sediment towards the mouth. Viewed the wrong way, the organ's spatula-like profile has given rise to the vulgar name of what was once a phylum of its own but is now regarded as a labile offshoot of the annelid branch of life. Echiurans are often lumped with peanut worms in textbooks, perhaps due to their unsegmented vermiformity, but whereas sipunculans can fully retract their introverts, spoon worms have no choice but to hang loose. The organ is deceptively prehensile, however, extending to 10 times or more its flaccid length in some species and is usually the only visible part of the animal, which stuffs its sausagey trunk under rocks or into muddy hollows. The worms' priapic form does little to discourage diners partial to marine wieners, though. One species has a fanbase in parts of East Asia, where the hapless things are boiled with leeks or served with salt and sesame oil as raw treats. The only named species in Singapore, Ochetostoma erythrogrammon, enjoys no such honour and is content to squirm in seagrass beds, extending its proboscis over the silt to snare edible deposits, until and unless a rough tide or rude digger lays one bare from its burrow, stranding a body of defiance in a shallow pool to wriggle and writhe in limp futility.
Comments