Velvet worms Onychophora are some of my favorite organisms, and they are also one of the oldest, barely changed. They have a distinctive body plan, somewhat wormlike in appearance with a velvety surface. They also use their slime glands to eject quite accurately jets of adhesive slime to unsuspecting invertebrates that they actively hunt on the forest floor and among the leaf litter.
“With their chubby bodies, soft, padded feet, and slow-motion gait, South American velvet worms appear pretty harmless. Unless they’re hungry, and you’re an insect. Over millennia, these ancient creatures have evolved a pair of hunting weapons unlike any other in nature: dual high-speed canons capable of jetting viscous slime onto their prey from up to two feet away. Delivered with such power and speed, the velvet worm’s slime canon takes the element of surprise to new levels. And because the goo is delivered through narrow, flexible tubes and expelled with such tremendous force, it can cover a vast area in a matter of milliseconds. Until recently, biologists still didn’t know exactly how these slime canons work. But then Andres Concha, a Chilean physicist who studies the physical mechanisms in biological systems, turned his attention to velvet worms. Concha and his team used high-speed cameras to film slime canons in action.”
TimeSpace Warps 