Last night my wife invited me my down to the basement to investigate a “kind of snakey kind of wormy thing crawling down the wall”. Well, such a description surely piqued my curiosity, so I went down for a look. It was a very fitting description. I know it was not a snake, though it (very slowly) moved along the granite block edges much like a snake would - clinging to the small ledges in a serpentine fashion.
It was colored and “textured” exactly like an earthworm and stretched out thinly to about 14" in length. I thought it was a very long, very skinny earthworm until, upon closer inspection, things got a little weird. It had a head, for one thing. A hammerhead, to be exact. Exactly like the shark on a much smaller scale (probably 1/4" across). The weirdness continued when, upon my wife’s insistence (no Buddhist in her), I killed the creature by cutting off its little hammerhead. Instead of flopping around in “cut in two earthworm” fashion and falling off the wall, the body began to shrink in place. And as is shrank it grew wider until it was about 3" long and 1/2" wide. The body then resembled that of a leach.
So we have a creature that looks and stretches like a worm, has a hammerhead, in death loses 80% of it’s length while gaining 5 times it’s girth, and still sticks to the wall. What IS it?
Ug, I have those flatworms in my yard. Slimy disgusting creatures.
From this site: "Land planarians (flat worms) devour earthworms, slugs, insect larvae, and are cannibalistic.
Because land planarians are photo-negative during daylight hours and require high humidity, they are found in dark, cool, moist areas. Land planarians are rare in rural sites. Movement and feeding occur at night. High humidity is essential to survival. They can survive desiccation only if water loss does not exceed 45 percent of their body weight. Land planarians are most abundant in spring and fall.
Planarians are a predator that you will want to remove and destroy every time you see one. They have been known to do great harm to worm growers."
Right now it looks like the winner is the flatworm Planeria, although the head on the one in my basement looked more rectangular than triangular. I’ll brush that off to dim lighting.