Giant predatory worms are invading France — and nobody noticed for almost two decades
The worms are part of a group of species called hammerhead flatworms, which originated in tropical Asia
By Jeremy Berke
When an amateur naturalist kept digging up strange, flat-headed worms in his garden outside of Paris, he knew something was amiss.
The naturalist, Pierre Gros, emailed a picture to Jean-Lou Justine, a zoologist at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. Justine thought it was a fake, but Gros persisted and kept sending in more images of the huge worms.
“The man is bringing back worms from his travels, and he pretends he finds them in his garden!” Justine told The Washington Post of his thoughts upon seeing the images.
But the two were on to an unsettling discovery: These worms, native to tropical Asia, were invading France — and nobody had noticed.
Gros and Justine teamed up on a new paper published in the journal PeerJ that documents occurrences of these native worms in France. As it turns out, these quiet invaders have been occupying French territory for almost two decades.
They’ve aso been found everywhere from England to French colonies in the Caribbean.