KALIMERO AND THE ALIEN
What follows is a short true story about Kalimero and the alien. It's told mostly through pictures ... photographs ... and it has no real conclusion ... resolution ... no bottom line.
This is Kalimero ... my cat ... a member of my lucky gang of 13 cats ...
... and this is the alien ... which didn't come from outer space ... but from a very different, liquid habitat here on earth, so it looks quite alien - like to us, land mammals.
The more I look at it, the more it looks like some practical special effect from the great 80' science fiction ... or horror ... it's a rubbery little thing ... like a well-made slimy children toy :D made to disgust and annoy.
In reality, from a strictly rational prospective, this is a very ordinary and widespread sea animal. The Pontobdella muricata ... a lovely name for a leech. It's a relatively long parasite, up to 20 centimeters when is stretched like on this photograph. It parasitizes on cartilaginous fishes, and was found on the thornback ray (Raja clavata) by @denisdenis during one of his adventurous fisherman working days.
This leech is quiet and lethargic during the day, motionless and partially coiled, attached by its posterior sucker, but becomes active at night, when it feeds ... the comparison with a vampire :) like Dracula and stuff, is inevitable. It can separate from its host and swim by flattening its body.
Like all leeches, this species is a hermaphrodite, and fertilization is internal. Each egg is enclosed in a spherical cocoon attached to empty clam or sea snail shells on the seabed. They are often irregularly grouped together, each with a slender, twisted stalk connecting it to a spreading, membranous, roots - like structure ... the cocoon sphere is filled with a thick, gelatinous material with the developing embryo spirally coiled within ... I mean, some pretty alien, pretty SF Horror stuff.
When it is near 2 centimeters long and ready to hatch, a pair of small, rounded protuberances at the side of the sphere fall off, allowing the juvenile leech to emerge and search for a suitable host.
When I put the creature on a sheet of marine - blue paper, I definitely didn't have a Caturday kind of post in mind ... but ... Kalimero came sniffing around, and instead of a more serious post focused on biology, the project ended up like this ...
... the cat stole the show ...
... the leech became a cat toy ...
... and all involved, except the leech, had a few laughs and some fun.
As always in these posts on HIVE, the photographs are my work.
Oh! Your cat is playing with the alien from the sea! I hope he didn’t eat the alien! LoL
It’s quite creepy to see it expands and contracts!! Luckily it cannot fit around your room!! Haha.
:D The alien didn't taste good enough for the cats, so it ended up in the garden, as fertilizer for plants.
Hahaha. Your cat has very good taste! This cat is a highbrow cat!! Hahaha. The alien will be reincarnated into bigger one!!
:D Aha, that's how the big monsters like Godzilla are made - through reincarnation ! This was a real enlightenment! :))))
What happened to the leech?
Kalimero looks young. How old is (he/she)?
I've never seen a sea leech, only a freshwater leech, and I saw that one at closer range than I would have liked--on my leg :)
The leech ended up on the compost in the garden, to become the fertilizer for tomatoes and some other plants. He,he you got a free leech therapy ... never saw a freshwater leech, outside the books and documentaries. This marine species attacks only fishes, especially rays.
Kalimero (she) is still young, about one year old, last winter appeared in my yard, was very small and completely rounded like a cartoon cat.
That thing is about as close to alien as I'm gonna see in this lifetime. No wonder the cat didn't want to eat it, but a cat still can't resist curiosity. !wine
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True :) It was too extraterrestrial to eat ... but to play with space stuff is OK.