Rare Worm Rock - Oregon Coast/PNW
While walking down the beach after king tides, you might find a gray, rounded rock with hundreds of tiny oval holes and a few larger round holes. What is this do you ask?
A longtime coastal resident might tell you that you found a piece of “brain coral.” Those Rocks- or reef-forming corals are found only in warm, semitropical to tropical seas. Your prize is the home of a colony of worms with the gruesome name Dodecaceria fewkesi. No common name has been given to them. They are related to tube-building worms such as feather duster worms and calcareous tube worms.
The animals have black bodies with tentacles and gills at the mouth end. To make their rock colonies, each worm extracts calcium carbonate from seawater and deposits the material around its body as a tube. When many worms live on top of one another, the individual tubes fuse into one large mass. The larger colonies are usually found on reefs below low-tide level. Strong winter storms can shift boulders and dislodge the colonies, or the weight of large waves themselves can break them from the reef. Most of the material found on beaches is not fossilized but comes from a colony that was recently alive. However, there is the chance of finding fossilized Pacific fission worm colonies on Oregon beaches, dating back to the Pleistocene era. Dodecaceria fewkesi colonies can easily be distinguished from coral by the way the burrows form in many directions, often crossing each other. - Found on Oregon Coast!
(Approximally)
Size : L: 6.5" W: 5.5" H: 4"
Weight: 5.13lb