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Project Noah Nature School
Australoplana sanguinea
This Flatworm was a baby, maybe 1 inch long-tiny. Pointy at both ends & creamy all over with an orange head & slightly darker on top. Similar to Australoplana alba complex but as I understand it, that species has one blunt end. It was damaged & dying. It's on a black plastic bag to show it up better. I accidentally took 2 very short videos but there is a booming noise in the background. Don't know why. The pictures & videos are blurry, as the closer I got, the more out of focus it became. I have since discovered the 'zoom' I should have used.
Doveton, Victoria, Australia. Found in clay soil, which I find strange as clay is hard & sticky when wet & they don't burrow. It had rained a lot, so I guess that made it easier to find. I haven't found any curled up under wood or rocks like some information says but I have found larger ones. They weren't as large as some in photos I've seen. I've found many more worms than Flatworms, so it seems to be true that in they're native land, they're not a problem to the worm community. All my other garden pests seem to be alive & kicking too.
Thanks to Alice Greenup for helping me to get these photos on this page. These are not great photos but I was encouraged to put them on anyway. Hope they're of benefit.
I think most of the sites I looked up were about them being in England & Ireland. I don't know which sites I got the information from now.
I just went back through my notes and can't find A sanguinea being pointy at both ends but these things are so stretchy they might make almost any shape. If you want I can share a copy of my notes so far re flatworms - I haven't read all of it myself yet.
Mark, from what I've read & photos associated, it seems that Sanguinea has 2 pointy ends & Alba complex has a stubby end. There were comments in the articles about it being mistaken for Alba complex. I hope I'm not wrong (or the information I found wasn't).
My goodness. Well done both of you !! Congratulations on your first spotting Meredyth. Your pics will get better with practice I'm sure. One of the great advantages with modern digital picture taking is that you can take hundreds at little extra cost and just delete what you don't want so practice is easy. Much better than the paper days. Although it is hard to tell there is enough colour graduation here and an obvious pointy end to say you are on the right track with identity. The term 'Australoplana alba complex' covers a whole range of species that show similarities and haven't been fully separated or described yet. As you live so close I would bet my orange ones are the same species as yours and probably the same as martinl's at Ringwood. However I haven't put my ID to species level where Martin has. The reason I held back was on the advice of Dr Leigh Winsor who is Australia's resident expert on this life-form. Martin might have not seen that advice. Dr Winsor is working on describing the groups and species across Australia and nearby mostly for the first time. I would say this one is definitely Austroplana sp. but I would be cautious of claiming it to be A sanguinea. I think I read somewhere that there are several that look similar and you would need to get an internal view of the pharynx to see the differences.... not my cup of tea. Welcome to Project Noah and start practising with the camera :-)
Great meredyth! I'm so glad to see you managed to get them up! I'm glad i could be of help, as for the ID I don't really know much about flatworms at all, I'd say mark could help.
Alice, the first mistake I made was putting the photos in a 'Word' folder & saving them, so they were no longer jpg format. The photo square didn't even bring up that file. Secondly, I didn't totally minimise the page I just made it smaller & tried to drag it into the bit of the square I could see on the right. I did it your way but Planet Noah photo square still won't accept 'shortcut' (desk top) photos from my computer. May it's something to do with Windows 7. I finally found the way to do it by selecting the File. I am so used to using 'Word' for everything that when I saw the list of files come up with 'Word' index the most prominent, I completely forgot to look at the index for other files on left hand side. One I did that, I found my photos in jpg format & after figuring out to double click on photo, I finally got the photos & information on to this page. Thanks heaps. I haven't put the videos on because of the booming noise & because they're so short & blurry. I imagine there's a different way to post them from photos anyway.
Spotted on Oct 14, 2013
Submitted on Oct 14, 2013
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