Over the last few posts, you’ve learned lots and lots of useless facts about the two of us but we haven’t talked much about our mascot, James “Wattwurm” the logworm. In an honest attempt to resolve this mistery, we sent off one half of our team on an special mission to the north german coast to gather intelligence.

transportation wasn’t emissions free, but we’ll admit it’s still environmentally friendly

While imagery worked out just fine (as you can see throughout this post), we’re not so sure about the fact finding part. The more information we came across, the less we liked it; in any event, we’ve decided to share it with you anyway.

Disclaimer: You’ve been warned. Proceed at your own risk

For starters, we’ve discovered that James is lazy and slightly antisocial; he digs holes in the sand for a living, and will then sit head first in said hole for weeks on end without moving much at all. His main activities are drinking seawater and eating sand, which we assume is the maritime equivalent of beer and pizza. Gross fact #1: Did I mention his sandhole is lined with mucus?

By the way: you shouldn’t mess with him, either.

Next, you’ll never see him on the surface. Gross fact #2: The only way to tell whether a logworm is present is… because he poops a lot. Yes, there it is, it’s out, we said it. We apologize but it would seem that’s just how things are. Large piles of poop indicate that a logworm just had lunch down in his sandhole; or dinner, or a snack, for that matter, since a new pile is produced every 30 to 40 minutes. Isn’t that quite a performance?

Now does this picture have “party” written all over it or what?

Somewhere above, we said logworms are antisocial; it turns out they also have Al Bundy’s sex life: Simply put, lugworms don’t have sex. Still, apparently, they do get horny – exactly once a year during the full moon of October.

hmm… sunset… is it October yet?

At this point, you might be thinking the same thing we are: Even though it’s only once a year, if everyone gets randy at the same time, at least hooking up and having fun should not be much of an issue and the whole dating thing would be much less of a nuisance, right?

(awesome dancefloor, too!)

Gross fact #3: that’s not how it works. Instead, all parties involved prefer to, well, umm, “relieve” themselves in the water where somehow reproduction is left alone to take place or not. Since logworms are still around, we’re inclined to conclude that it works – even though it sounds completely disappointing.

We’re not gonna elaborate this topic any further, just remember not to go swimming in the sea in October. Ever.

Here’s an innocent landscape to take your mind off, well, “that other thing”

On the other hand, beyond the slightly questionable facts presented above, we can also report that a logworm filters about 25 kg of sand per year, and since there are typically 30 to 40 worms per square meter, they pretty much manage to filter the top 20 cm of the entire north sea tidal zone within a year which, again, sounds like quite a performance. (We apologize if you’re not familiar with metric units; a simple google search will allow you to find a conversion website for you to work out how many scruples or furlongs this corresponds to).

We think this is enough fact finding for today, so we’ll leave it at that. We’ll only add one completely unrelated piece of information we somehow came across while doing a bit of research. Did you know there is a bird called fluffy-backed tit-babbler? We’ll let you work out for yourself what kind of person comes up with such a name, or perhaps what kind of company he was with when he did.

yes, that would be it. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the fluffy-backed tit-babbler.

Sources: The bird pic and the poop pic were stolen from Wikipedia.