Gardeners are the people most likely to encounter them, while digging in the soil or turning over rocks and logs.īut it's OK. The most common species in Georgia, though, feeds on earthworms. Some land planarians feed on slugs and insect larvae. Even more oddly, the same opening serves as its anus.Īlthough they're found around plant nurseries, they're harmless to plants. It wraps itself around an earthworm, attacking prey up to 10 times its size, and sucks its juices. Strangely, the planarian's mouth isn't on its head but halfway down its belly. Land planarians lay eggs, but they can also reproduce by budding, or detaching from the tail end a small segment that develops a new head within a week or so. These dried slime trails are signs of planarians, although they look exactly like the tracks that slugs or snails leave behind. Like snails and slugs, land planarians glide on mucus, secreting slime to help them move. When it's crawling, though, it can easily double this length. Relaxed, a land planarian may be only 3 or 4 inches long. Because they avoid light, they spend the daylight hiding in moist places under logs or in the soil. Land planarians can easily desiccate, or dry out, so they have to remain in cool, damp areas. But light-sensitive cells allow them to perceive light, which they shun.

In some parts of the world, they're called 'shovel-headed garden worms.' While the top is typically gray to greenish-brown with darker stripes, the underside is pale. Their semicircular heads look like little spatulas.

They don't have circulatory, respiratory or skeletal systems. Land planarians are in a primitive group of worms called, aptly enough, flatworms. If the habitat is warm and moist enough, they can escape and get established in the wild. They're typically found near greenhouses. Originating in Asia, they've traveled around the world in nursery pots, arriving in North America a century ago. It's one of those things that, when you find it, you just have to find out what it is.

From time to time, someone somewhere in Georgia turns over a rock or log and finds a grayish brown, flat worm with a head shaped like a half-moon.

Worms with flat heads