Author's Note: The Innkeeper worm, scientific name Urechis caupo, is a worm that lives in burrows under the sand along the western shores of North America. It is sometimes called the "Penis Fish" because of its resemblance to the human male sexual organ. In December 2019, it was reported that an unusual number of Penis Fish showed up on the beach at Drake's Bay in Point Reyes, California, as a result of having been disturbed from their burrows under the sand by a strong storm.
This story was inspired by the reports of that event.
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No one had ever seen anything quite like it before.
One day, after a big storm, beaches up and down the coast of Northern California lay covered in countless numbers of wriggling, pink tubes -- Innkeeper worms, also called "Penis Fish" because of their resemblance to the human male sexual organ. The worms typically lived under the sand, out of sight to people except on rare occasions. But, once in a while, storms would wash away the sand layer, disturbing the worms' burrows and exposing them in great numbers.
Still, never had so many of them been exposed at once, in so many different locations.
Professor Elizabeth Goodsen, a marine biologist working for the University of California, walked along a beach north of Santa Cruz, marveling at the sight. For as far as the eye could see, the sand was blanketed by the pink tubes of the worms, some still, some squirming. Swarming over them were crowds of people. Some of them picked up the strange creatures and played with them. Others gathered them to take them home. Still others just stared at the extraordinary phenomenon and took pictures with their smart phones.
Goodsen had come to collect a few specimens for testing and observation. A well-known specialist in marine annelids, she was familiar with this species of worm, but she had never seen them before in such numbers.
She stood over a clump of the worms, wriggling slowly on the sand. The nickname, "Penis Fish," fit. They were pink, thick, mostly five- to eight-inches long, with a distinct bulb at one end.
She picked one up. It was still living. She was surprised at its weight. The worm pulsed in a strange way beneath the grip of her fingers. She put it and a few others in collection bags. She also selected a few that appeared to be dead. They would be dissected at the lab, which was not more than 15 minutes away.
Elizabeth sneezed, loudly. She had been fighting a cold for several days. Her nose ran and her throat hurt.
Later in the morning, back at the lab, Elizabeth separated the living Penis Fish from the dead ones. She emptied the bag of dead ones into a stainless steel bowl. She dropped the living ones into a sturdy, glass-sided tank that had been prepared for them, with sand at the bottom and a pool of water at one end where the sand had been partly scooped out. It was a big tank, eight feet long. She dropped all the living Penis Fish into that tank, except one. She wanted to look at it more closely before she put it into the tank with the rest.
This worm was bigger than the others, maybe eight inches long, and thick enough that it was difficult to get a good grip around its girth. It wriggled and pulsed in her hand. Its ends flopped wildly to either side.
It looked strange to her. She'd seen Innkeeper worms before, but this one looked different. Elizabeth was puzzled. It was difficult to tell which end was the front and which was the back. Previous specimens she had encountered presented no such difficulty. Typically, the mouth was easy to identify by the proboscis that issued from it. But she saw no proboscis on the worm she held. One end of the worm ended in a small hole, which she assumed was the anus. While she held the wriggling worm, trying to keep it from slipping out of her grasp, a dollop of white cream emerged from the hole. It spilled onto the palm of her hand. The cream was warm. Her hand tingled pleasantly where the cream touched it.
She placed the worm in the tank. Instead of burrowing into the sand, it wriggled to the side of the tank and banged one of its ends against the glass. Elizabeth held her hand closer to her face. The cream from the worm slowly disappeared. Either it was evaporating into the air, or it was soaking into the pores of her skin. She couldn't tell which. But she noted the continuing feeling of pleasant warmth of the cream on her hand as it faded away.
Her curiosity piqued, Elizabeth turned to the steel bowl with the dead worm specimens. She picked up one of them and took it to an examination table. A high-powered microscope stood on the table. She gathered various knives and scalpels to dissect the specimen.
She inserted a scalpel at one end of the worm and sliced it down its length. She peeled back the two halves. What she saw unnerved her so much it made her gasp.
A worm's anatomy typically is simple. It takes in nutrients from one end -- the mouth -- and emits waste from the other end -- the anus. In between lie the organs of digestive tract, stretching from one end to the other, as well as a very rudimentary circulatory system and nervous system.
But this creature's interior was far more complex.
At one end, she saw no mouth. But she saw numerous small openings and tubes that coalesced in an interior pouch that she took to be a kind of stomach. In the middle of the worm's interior was a long, tubular sack full of the white fluid she had seen on her hand. A lengthy channel connected this sack to the opposite end of the worm, where it emitted the white fluid.
The strangest thing, though, was the prominent, spongy organ at the opposite end of the worm, near the many openings. It was dense, and its surface bore innumerable tiny bulges and ripples. It looked familiar. The tissue looked like that of a . . . brain.
A brain. It looked like a complex brain, like that of a mammal. But that was impossible. No worm she'd ever observed had anything that resembled a complex brain. But this one did.
Using a scalpel, Elizabeth cut a thin slice from the "brain." She placed it on a sliver of glass. She looked at the specimen under the microscope.
The microscope was powerful enough to observe the specimen at the cellular level. She adjusted the magnification. What she saw made no sense to her.
She saw what she understood to be cells, with membranes. But she saw no nuclei, or other familiar structures. The "cells" seemed to be filled with organelles of a kind she'd never seen before, moving in a fast, fluid motion inside each of the "cells."
Slowly, gradually, reluctantly, Elizabeth realized what she was looking at: a completely different organism. It wasn't an Innkeeper worm, or any kind of worm she'd ever seen. This was something utterly different.
A soft thud interrupted her thoughts. She looked to its source. It was the worm that she had held in her hand before, now inside the glass tank. It was at the edge, banging one of its ends against the glass.
Elizabeth stared at it, transfixed. It seemed to be trying to get her attention.
"This is impossible," she said out loud.
She pulled her phone out of her pocket. She thought she should call Mark, another marine biologist, and the chief of the lab. He should know about this, she thought. She held her thumb over the face of the phone for a full minute, but she didn't call.
I'll tell him when he's in the lab tomorrow, she thought to herself.
The clock said "5:00." It was time to leave the lab. Elizabeth checked the tank before she left. She covered the steel bowl containing the dead worms and placed it in a storage refrigerator. She looked back at the tank. The Penis Fish -- it wasn't a worm, so she didn't know what else to call it -- sat on the sand, not moving, but pulsing, with one end pressed against the glass. It was the end with the hole, and she saw a white drop emerge from it. The pulse moved through the Penis Fish's body, like a wave.
She felt uneasy, but she didn't know why. She would dissect and observe more of the worms the next day, and if the findings were consistent with what she'd found so far, she would call Mark and others.
