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Thanks to photovisual.info website for allowing us to watch this photo.
| Earthworm
is the usual name for the largest members of Oligochaeta in the phylum
Annelida. In classical systems they were placed in the order Opisthopora,
on the basis of the male pores opening posterior to the female pores,
even though the internal male segments are anterior to the female. Theoretical
cladistic studies have placed them instead in the suborder Lumbricina
of the order Haplotaxida, but this may again soon change. Folk names for
the earthworm include "dew-worm", "rainworm", "night
crawler" and "angleworm" (due to its use as fishing bait).
Earthworms are also called megadriles (or
big worms), as opposed to the microdriles (or small worms) in the families
Tubificidae, Lumbriculidae, and Enchytraeidae, among others. The megadriles
are characterized by having a multilayered clitellum (which is much more
obvious than the single-layered one of the microdriles), a vascular system
with true capillaries, and male pores behind the female pores.
Earthworms have a simple circulatory system. They have two main blood vessels that extend through the length of their body: a ventral blood vessel which leads the blood to the posterior end, and a dorsal blood vessel which leads to the anterior end. The dorsal vessel is contractile and pumps blood forward, where it is pumped into the ventral vessel by a series of "hearts" (aortic arches) which vary in number in the different taxa. A typical lumbricid will have 5 pairs of hearts. The blood is distributed from the ventral vessel into capillaries on the body wall and other organs and into a vascular sinus in the gut wall where gases and nutrients are exchanged. This arrangement may be complicated in the various groups by suboesophageal, supraoesophageal, parietal and neural vessels, but the basic arrangement holds in all earthworms. Earthworms eat in a unique way: their mouth cavity connects directly into the digestive tract without any intermediate processes. Most earthworms are decomposers feeding on undecayed leaf and other plant matter, others are more geophagous. |
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