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Larval Parades & Other Transient Aggregate 'Pseudo-Organisms'

Dingo667

Dingo667

Gone But Not Forgotten
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When I was about 18, my parents used to have a lttle bit of land for themselves with a wooden hut on. The toilet was a selfmade little cabin, about 1/2 meter lowered into the ground. Basically when you sat on the loo, you were surrounded up to kneehight by bare earth.
So one day, whilst sitting there I saw a black slug crawling along the floor. Me who likes snails and slugs, I wanted to rescue it but couldn't be bothered to bend over to pick it up, so I used a stick or a root that was to hand to sort of touch it. Imagine my surprise and mighty digust, when th ewhole thing started to disintegrate into hundrets of little black wormlike things. Each shiny and elongated. I never got off a toilet so quickly!
What were they???
They had obviously travelled as a group but why take on the EXACT shape of a slug?
I have tried to find out what it was but up to this day I have absolutely no idea. Does anyone know what they could have been?
 
Gee, I don't know.

This sounds like it could be a similar situation : when scorpions hatch, the little scorpions all climb onto the mother's back and ride there until they grow bigger. Could there have been a larger similar critter at the core of this?


Also, have you ever seen a swarm of ants carring off some dead bug?
 
I'm 99% sure that what you experienced was a very rare phenomenon of fungus gnat (Sciaridae) larvae parade.

As far as I know biologists still haven't been able to explain why thousand or millions of them sometimes gather together and travel in a form of a snail or a worm. I've heard stories of even 3 metres long "worms".

Here in Finland we have this legend: if you dig the earth from the spot where the "slug" disintegrates you find a pot of gold. :)

Sorry about my bad english. I'm very drunk.

edit: Some questions... Which country do you live in? What time of the year was this?
 
Not too sure about the fungus gnat theory.


Under favorable conditions, fungus gnats complete their life cycle in 3 weeks, permitting rapid population build-up. Adults are attracted to moss and other organic matter on styroblocks or greenhouse floors, where they lay their eggs. Larvae emerge and are legless, semi-transparent, milky-white worms with black heads, reaching 5 mm in length.
 
I live in the UK but this happpened in the early eighties in Germany.

I thought it might have been some "larval parade" (much later though) but I couldn't find anywhere that said something about totally black larvae. They all moved about fairly quickly once the "slug" had disintegrated, that's why I got the hell out of there so quickly. It still gives me shivers just thinking about it. Just for more info, it was about 12 cm long and the width of a "usual" slug, it was moving slowly (until I poked it). I would be interested "whose" larvae they were.
Also just to further this a little, only about two weeks later, I saw a strange stick with a round head, that also disintegrated when touched. Now I found out that that was definetly a fungal spore, the weird thing was though that the ones I read about where pretty small, whereas the one I saw must have stood at least 10cm tall!
Maybe my parents place is a portal to a strange dimension :spinning ... ;)
 
Oh, I now see that the "slug" was black in color. I guess some other insect has similar habits.:blah:
 
Slime Mold ?

I think it might have been a "grex". This is the motile phase of the life cycle of slime molds. Slime molds are amoeboid. To reproduce, the amoebas flow together and form a slug-like body called a grex. One celled animals come together to form something resembling a single macroscoping organism. The grex scoots about looking for a spot to rest. WHen it finds what it likes (good schools?), it becomes a "fruiting body", a bulb on a stalk. The seeming macroscopic animal becomes like a tiny plant. The fruiting body matures, bursts, and sends out spores which settle to the ground. In a moist environment, each spore becomes a new amoeba.

Why such a life cycle? Don't ask me; I just live here.

Anyway, if you poke a grex with a stick, it might lose its cohesion. This is also consistent with the observation that it fell apart into many smaller black worms as opposed to a pile of distinguishable mollusc innards.

Here is a web page on slime molds:

http://www.discoverlife.org/nh/tx/Slime_Molds/

They have a lot of photographs, but I found none that seem to bear out my hypothesis.

I have consumed the entire "It Happened to Me" archives, out of morbid curiousity. But this is my first post. Hi, guys!

Hungy Joe

For more about slime moulds / slime molds see:
Slime Mould / Slime Mold
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/slime-mould-slime-mold.66485/
 
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Wow, Hungry Joe, that makes total sense, as the thing with the stalk that I saw after the "snail" thingy wasn't too far away. It never occured to me that both "sightings" could have been of the same thing in different stages. I think you are spot on with your explanation.
Still I've never seen anything like it ever again.
 
Fascinating. Anyone know what kind of worms they are? Not earthworms, they look a little like leaches to me?
 
The phenomenon is commonly called a 'larva parade' or 'larval parade'.
 
Very cool - a new weird species is crawling around - and as I'm in the south eastern US, maybe one day I'll encounter such a thing!
 
Never seen anything like that, weird.
 
Swifty said:
Enola's combine a few posts to create this thread, I wasn't sure where to post this weird 10 minute video of what looks like an above mentioned larval parade? ..

Live | Facebook
Click to expand...
I've never seen anything like that before.
 
The larvae of certain sawfly species exhibit this sort of aggregation behavior.

Perreyia.jpg

SOURCE: https://facultyweb.cortland.edu/fitzgerald/otherspecies1.html

The Pergidae are a moderate-sized family of sawflies occurring in the Western Hemisphere and the Australasian Region. ...

Larvae of some Perreyia species travel in groups on the ground and eat dead or dying vegetation. They also travel as groups to find group pupation sites. These groups are a tight-knit mass of larvae crawling over each other looking like a giant slug. In the genus Perga, groups come to periodic halts and individuals within the groups begin to raise and lower their abdomens to communicate to the rest of the group to begin moving again.
Click to expand...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pergidae
 
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