One of the kids found this strange, orangey wormlike creature frottaging across the garden path last night. It’s apparently unsegmented. The photo shows it contracted but it can extend bits of its body to funny lengths (about 5 inches long & contrated in photo) in a sinister fashion, a bit like an earthworm but ten times as fast. It could also lift almost half it’s body skywards (as if paying freaky homage to the full moon). It was much more orange in the flesh and not as pale as the crappy photo suggests.

After a spot of heavy googling the only thing I could find vaguely similar usually lives in the rain forest leaf-litter of Austalasia.

Any leads, or was it’s existence caused by the spontaneous action of moonlight on mud or something?

KILL IT! And ask questions later.

is it a baby robin?

nematode?

It’s a wormy thing.

An orange worm? Maybe been for a spray tan.

A baby one of these?

well that’s a lie. Paul was well aware that sandworms were responsible for Spice production.

checked under your bed recently…. i hear those things prefer to eat at night…

Looks like and Australian flatworm.

Eats “real” worms. Lots of them can knacker your soil quality cos of this. They don’t seem as nasty to our worms as the New Zealand flatworm.

checked under your bed recently…. i hear those things prefer to eat at night…

…..except when it’s a full moon then they prefer to dance a freaky lambada.

Looks like and Australian flatworm.

Cheers Labwormy. Done some ‘Aussie flat worm’ googling and it does fit the description, although ours was bigger than the suggested 3cm size in the link below. It was near one of the compost heaps though so it’d probably been guzzling hundreds of red-worms for supper, hence the larger size 😉

http://www.dgsgardening.btinternet.co.uk/flatworm_australian.htm