Japanese biologists have described a new species of spoon worm from the sandy tidal flat Hachi-no-higata of the Seto Inland Sea, Japan.

Spoon worms, scientifically called Echiura, are a small group of exclusively marine animals. They derive their name from elongated and spoon-like projection (the proboscis), issuing from the barrel- or sweet potato-like roundish body proper (the trunk).

Although spoon worms are members of annelid worms, most of which has segmented structure, they have lost segmentation during their evolutionary history.

Most spoon worms live in shallow waters, but some are connected with deep sea waters. They are deposit feeders – they use their ‘spoon’ to collect organic particles or fragments from their surroundings.

Previously confused with a different species, the newly discovered spoon worm Arhynchite hayaoi used to be in fact rather abundant and collected in great numbers from intertidal to subtidal sandy bottoms for fish bait in the Seto Inland Sea, Japan.

Dr Masaatsu Tanaka and Dr Teruaki Nishikawa, both from the Toho University in Chiba, have described the new species in a paper published in the open access journal Zookeys.

Like most spoon worms, the animal has the typical peculiar spoon shaped proboscis. It is of a pinkish-yellow color, and its body length reaches about 4 inches (10 cm) in total.

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Bibliographic information: Tanaka M, Nishikawa T. 2013. A new species of the genus Arhynchite (Annelida, Echiura) from sandy flats of Japan, previously referred to as Thalassema owstoni Ikeda, 1904. ZooKeys 312: 13–21; doi: 10.3897/zookeys.312.5456