Unlocking Flatworm Body Secrets: Bilateral Symmetry and More - Puffin Foundation Resources
Off with their heads. Light-averse planarian flatworms, known for their incredible ability to regenerate lost body parts, shy away from light even after they have been decapitated. This suggests they ...
Understanding the Context
Platyhelminthes (from Ancient Greek πλατύ (platy) 'flat' and ἕλμινς (helmins) 'parasitic worm') [4] is a phylum of relatively simple bilaterian, unsegmented, soft-bodied invertebrates commonly called flatworms or flat worms. Being acoelomates (having no body cavity), and having no specialised circulatory and respiratory organs, they are restricted to having flattened shapes that ... Flatworm, any of the phylum Platyhelminthes, a group of soft-bodied, usually much flattened invertebrates. Several species are free-living, but about 80 percent are parasitic.
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Key Insights
They are bilaterally symmetrical and lack specialized respiratory, skeletal, and circulatory systems; no body cavity (coelom) is present. Description A flatworm's soft body is ribbon-shaped, flattened dorso-ventrally (from top to bottom), and bilaterally symmetric. They are the simplest triploblastic animals with organs. This means their organ systems form out of three germ layers: An outer ectoderm and an inner endoderm, with a mesoderm between them. Turbellarians generally have a ciliated epidermis, while cestodes and ...
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Flatworms can rebuild themselves from just a small fragment, and now scientists know why. Their stem cells ignore nearby instructions and respond to long-distance signals from other tissues. This ... Elizabeth Preston, writing at Inkfish: How good are you at remembering something you learned two weeks earlier? What if during the intervening 14 days, your head was removed? One flatworm isn’t ...
A newly discovered saltwater flatworm, pale yellow and about the size of a silver dollar, can take down mollusks in their shells, thanks to a powerful neurotoxin also found in puffer fish. Yet this ...