Good bait comes to worms who wait...
Lurking in the seas of Indonesia is a fearsome predator bearing jaws fringed with razor-sharp spikes.
Hapless fish – even predators on the hunt themselves – cannot escape if seized. So sudden and fierce is the snap of its jaws, prey may be sliced instantly in two, as if put to death by a bionic marine guillotine.
The oceans are heaving with fearsome predators, but there is something particularly odd about this one: it is not a clever cephalopod (octopuses and cuttlefish), a sophisticated cetacean (dolphins and whales) or monomaniacal elasmobranch (sharks and rays).
It is a worm.
A polychaete to be precise, a class of bristled worm found in the oceans (and occasionally on land) that are a world apart from the everyday squirming annelids we find in our gardens.