Worm eggs and sperm

Feb 13, 2007 14:31 GMT  ·  By

If you think caviar is produced only in Russia and around the Black Sea -Caspian Sea, well, you may be wrong.

That's because in the islands of the Pacific they have a type of caviar, too. The Pacific caviar is a very special one because common people can afford to eat it (and will eat it in large quantities) and it is not the product of sturgeon fishes but of some ? worms.

Yes, annelid sea worms, named palolo.

Males and females are very different in aspect: while the males are brown-reddish, the females are green-bluish.

Once or twice yearly, when the moon enters in its last quarter, the palolo worms rise to the surface in mass during a maximum of three nights to release their sexual products.

Science has still not discovered what makes the worms rise at such a precise timing, but some believe it could be due to a rise of water temperature, the effect of the moon phases and the tides and the duration of moon light.

Some methods employed to forecast their emergence are the observation of atmospheric conditions and the sea, and the bloom of certain sea plants.

Recently, marine biologists have made predictions based on the moon phases and the Metonic cycle (which lasts for 19 years). When the worms rise, all the people in the villages of the islands (from Fiji to Solomon, Cook, Samoa, Tonga and Vanuatu), from men and women to children enter the ocean wading or in canoes.

The water is milky with mucous.

Once on the surface, the worms get stuck on everything: buckets, hand nets, mosquito nets, basket made of coconut tree leaves, hands. The astonishing phenomenon will last only few hours, and it always starts at 2 a.m. The islanders eat the worms even raw, but they can be boiled, roasted or fried. The worms can be baked into a loaf with coconut milk and onions.

In local restaurants, you can find roasted palolo worms.

Close to the shore, the islanders dig lovos, a kind of subterranean ovens, in order to cook the palolo.

Once cooked, they can be preserved for a week or more.

Palolo is rich in vitamins, minerals, proteins and fats.

Some westerners say about the palolo's taste to be fishy, scratchy, salty, tart, even like a mix of seaweed and ... caviar (!), but it may be also an acquired taste and most westerners reject it.

One thing must be mentioned: palolo are not exactly what seem to be.

The rear half of the worms suffer a drastic metamorphosis during which it develops rapidly reproductive organs full of sex cells (gametes).

This rear part, called epitoke, possesses eyes and paddle-like extremities, getting separated from the rest of the worm and rising to the surface.

The rest of the worms keep on living in the reefs.

If the epitoke is not caught by humans or predators, its wall bursts, releasing the eggs and sperm cells, which triggers a well directed "casual" encounter.

Because of the huge number of eggs, even with the depletion made by people and predators, there will be enough eggs to generate new larvae that will colonize the proper reef and start the vital cycle of the worms.

There are also other species of polychaete worms which perform the epitoky in other parts of the world, like Indonesia, Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean Sea and Japan.

Thus, palolo are just worm eggs and sperm.

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