Flatworms are so funny especially when they have eyespots, this isn't a planarian but I met this guy on the beach recently (Notocomplana)

DID YOU KNOW🚨: Hermaphroditic flatworms engage in penis fencing duels. Each tries to stab the other to inject sperm. The "winner" fertilizers the other, becoming the father. The "loser" is inseminated, becomes the mother, and must bear the cost of pregnancy.

Flatworms exposed to weak electromagnetic fields at 100 Hz completely lost their ability to learn, while unexposed worms learned normally. The EMF was just 1 microtesla—thousands of times weaker than your smartphone produces 🧵 #EMF #Health

ICYMI Hammerhead worms are predatory land flatworms being found in large numbers again in many states. Do NOT touch or cut them! They're toxic & reproduce asexually so every cut piece regenerates! Use salt or vinegar to kill them.

Stanford scientists just discovered an immune cell that literally detonates itself like a bomb — killing surrounding threats in seconds before vanishing completely. Found in flatworms, these "ruptoblasts" are unlike anything seen in human biology. unityphysio.com/a-tiny-flatw…

Today's news: flatworms' penis fencing duel captivates online

Stanford researchers find a 'bomb-like' immune cell hidden inside flatworms ift.tt/cEPd4kI

How else would I duel with a spike as if it were a sword? It’s not as though I could do what flatworms do because we can’t become gravid from a mesh wound. Frankly it’s a good thing that Cybertronians do NOT work that way.

The physical trauma of high-explosive shells would not kill him, but the energy required to heal such massive cellular damage would instantly drain his caloric reserves. The subsequent forced regression would reduce him to a defenseless human, easily kept in a standard concrete cell. Arthur was trapped in a perfect physiological cage. He had to dig deeper into the dark, crushing weight of the earth simply to earn the precise number of calories required to keep his body from collapsing in on itself. He thought about the scholarship application. He thought about the door he had never opened. Then he turned toward the mountain and began to dig. --- **II. The Human Mole** Deep beneath the bedrock, the air was a thick, humid soup of stone dust and sweat. Arthur worked in the absolute dark, his massive hands clawing through granite faces that would have shattered standard steel excavators. FIRA's economic analysts had realized that Arthur was vastly superior to any mechanical alternative. The pinnacle of modern civil engineering was the Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM), a multi-million-dollar behemoth often referred to as a "mole." But even the largest TBMs, reaching up to 17.6 meters in diameter, were agonizingly slow. In ideal geological conditions, a TBM managed a rate of only 15 to 50 meters of excavation per day. During the construction of the Gotthard Base Tunnel under the Swiss Alps, the absolute record achieved was a meager 56 meters in a 24-hour cycle — a pace equivalent to a snail crawling at 0.0064 m/s. Mechanical TBMs were perpetually bottlenecked by their "Advance Cycle," which demanded constant shutdowns for ground support installation, cutter head maintenance, utility setup, and dewatering. Arthur had no mechanical downtime. His Rate of Advance was limited solely by his physical stamina and the speed at which his handlers could feed him. He ripped through hundreds of meters of hard rock per shift, his human intelligence allowing him to navigate fault lines and stabilize tunnel roofs with the same instinctive accuracy that had once made him dream of building bridges. But the cost of his kinetic output was staggering. Every thrust of his arms burned millions of calories, generating a lethal build-up of internal heat. According to standard mammalian physiology, Arthur should have died of hyperthermia long ago. In 1883, the physiologist Rubner had demonstrated that because biological bodies lose heat passively through their surface area but produce it metabolically throughout their volume, an organism's surface area must scale to the 2/3 power of its mass (M^{2/3}) to avoid burning itself alive. Arthur's biology circumvented this thermodynamic limit through a hyper-efficient adaptation of Kleiber's Law. Across standard taxa, an organism's basal metabolic rate scales as the 3/4 power of its mass: B ∝ M^{3/4} This relationship remains valid from microscopic mitochondria up to the largest mammalian structures. In Arthur, his cellular behavior mirrored the unique allometry of planarian flatworms (Schmidtea mediterranea). His metabolic efficiency did not stem from a decrease in cellular metabolic rate, but from a massive, size-dependent increase in the mass per individual cell. His cells packed hyper-dense lipid and glycogen stores directly into their structure, acting as organic capacitors that stabilized his body temperature. Yet, the physical labor of digging still forced his body into aggressive diet-induced thermogenesis (DIT). Digestion and muscle contraction combined to create an internal furnace. He lived in a state of continuous, agonizing hyperhidrosis. Sweat poured from his macro-scaled skin in steaming torrents — a phenomenon his handlers jokingly referred to as the industrial-scale "meat sweats."

speaking of the penis fencing flatworms, i remember some guy coming to our school and giving us a whole presentation about them and then leaving. truly ahead of his time

I've seen the "duel" framing of flatworms' hypodermic insemination be framed in terms of the high energetic costs of biological reproduction. But I dont see why the latter necessitates interpreting this as "winner versus loser."

eitkeis are losing their minds why am i seeing flatworms now.

so it’s flatworms now…… right

Scientists have just discovered flatworms engage in penis duels to the death! x.com/cynicallycute/status/2… The news is blowing up and being memed on X with millions of views everyone is posting memes about it, they fight to be THE LAST GOONER

I get that our 2 second attention spans are on penis fencing flatworms rn but here are the rocks I could have done moon stone for eito but I wanted a rock not a gem even if its also a rock

what if a third flatworm joins and one gets stabbed by two flatworms at the same time? would that make it a double pregnancy?

" that's just how flatworms do! they are hermaphrodites and whoever loses the PENIS FENCING has the babies. "