Happy 20th birthday #BiodiversityHeritageLibrary! 🎂🥳

This week, GBIF Executive Secretary Joe Miller is at the Natural History Museum, #London celebrating #BHLDay2026.

The public symposium celebrates the incredible collaboration of libraries, museums, herbaria and research institutions around the world to deliver open access to biodiversity knowledge. It also reviews and reflects on future opportunities for BHL to further integrate into the bioinformatics data environment. 📖

Piseinotecus

The other day I stumbled upon this passage in the Wikipedia page of Piseinotecus, a genus of beautiful nudibranch sea slugs:

The name Piseinotecus comes from the Portuguese sentence “pisei no Teco” (I stepped onto Teco). Teco was the name of a dog of the zoologists Ernst Marcus and Eveline Du Bois-Reymond Marcus. While they were looking for a name for the genus, their friend, the zoologist Diva Diniz Corrêa, was visiting them and stated the sentence while coming down the stairs to announce that she had accidentally stepped onto their dog.

From the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piseinotecus

What a delightful story! Ernst, Eveline, and Diva were brilliant zoologists and contributed immensely to our knowledge of marine invertebrates.

The source is a short paper of recollections written by Eveline:

Piseinotecus is an entire sentence in Portuguese. Our friend, Diva, stated it while coming down the stairs one day. She had stepped upon our dog, Teco, and while we were looking for a new generic name, had told us Pisei (in Portuguese) = I stepped; no = onto; Tecus = the dog’s name. In the meantime, this genus has turned out to be the type of a new family. Piseinotecidae appears in the literature today.

See it here: https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/45940346#page/459/mode/1up

Marcus, E. d. B.-R. (1987). Selected Recollections from My Life. American Malacological Bulletin, 5, 183–184. https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/part/143207

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URL: https://brunovellutini.com/posts/piseinotecus/

#bibliography #biodiversity #biodiversityHeritageLibrary #invertebrate #marineBiology #mollusca

Histoire de la Thécidie

Mais uma busca por trabalhos históricos sobre braquiópodes cumprida com sucesso através da @BioDivLibrary :)

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URL: https://brunovellutini.com/posts/histoire-de-la-thecidie/

#bibliografia #biodiversidade #biodiversityHeritageLibrary #biologiaMarinha #brachiopoda #invertebrado #tuíte

BHL Image Explorer

This is a wonderful project mashing images from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) with data from Wikidata and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).

BHL Image Explorer: https://bhl-gallery.toolforge.org/

It enables us to explore the figure plates present in BHL’s catalog (also on Flickr and Wikimedia Commons), links with other databases, and keeps track of their use in Wikipedia pages. It’s a nice way to expose these images and encourage their use on Wikipedia.

The project was created by Tiago Lubiana who was BHL’s Wikimedian-in-Residence during last semester. He finished his term a couple of months ago are wrote some closing thoughts in BHL’s blog. I enjoyed the quote below.

In an age of cheap, AI-generated illustrations, there is something grand in seeing these human-made pieces of scientific art, tales of the biodiversity-loving nature of humankind across the centuries.

Seeds for the Future: Closing Thoughts from BHL’s Wikimedian-in-Residence at https://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2025/07/seeds-for-future-closing-thoughts-from-bhls-wikimedian-in-residence.html

Via Siobhan Leachman.

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URL: https://brunovellutini.com/posts/bhl-image-explorer/

#bibliography #biodiversity #biodiversityHeritageLibrary #image

Is Lineus longissimus the longest animal on Earth?

Last year, the PeerJ journal published an article about the largest marine animals. The neat infographic accompanying their tweet immediately got my attention (if the figure is not showing up, check it in full resolution here):

For a couple of milliseconds, I thought the scale bar below the whales was a worm. Why? Because here in Norway, at the Sars Centre, we study a ribbon worm named Lineus longissimus—the longest animal on Earth.

Or at least it’s supposed to be. That is what’s in the Guinness World Records (Cawardine 1995), on Wikipedia, in books and papers, and recently on the BBC. Every year on Bergen’s Research Day, we tell the kids that this thin, dark-brownish worm they are looking at under the scope can reach 60 meters long! But how do we know?

Finding Lineus longissimus

We collect live specimens of Lineus longissimus by dredging the bottom of the Norwegian fjords near Bergen. They are active, bear a good dose of charisma, and survive well in the laboratory. They are also voracious predators and like to feed on annelids, which are usually swallowed whole:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zg7pH8xdDk

But so far, the longest individual we’ve found is near two meters long. How could it reach sixty?

Digging up old literature

Here is what the most-cited description says:

The longest known worm is the bootlace worm (Lineus longissimus), a kind of ribbon worm or nemertine (Nemertea) found in the shallow waters of the North Sea. A specimen which washed ashore after a severe storm at St. Andrews, Fife, UK, in 1864, measured more than 55 m (ca. 180 ft) in length.

Cawardine 1995

In 1864, a nearly sixty meters worm was found in Scotland. Found by whom? Measured how? Preserved where? Who wrote the original report? All the links mentioned above converge to one source: Cawardine (1995). But to my surprise, his book does not cite the original report. For this reason, I decided to check out what humanity knows about the length of Lineus longissimus.

I knew the date. The location suggested that the report must be in some British literature. To find the original sixty-meter observation, I resorted to the great Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), which helped me several times to access the classical literature during my doctorate work. BHL has a neat feature where you can search the literature by a species name, and the bootlace worm Lineus longissimus is present in many publications.

Here is an almost exhaustive compilation of reports on the length of Lineus longissimus:

What I found is that nobody has ever captured (and reported) a live Lineus longissimus more than 10 meters long (but see below!). The longest length is reported by Davies (1816) as 28 meters, and this is an approximation based on how the animal shrinks upon fixation. All subsequent reports simply reproduce this number as a maximum length.

What about the sixty-meter worm from St. Andrews?

An ocean’s giant

I initially missed it, and months went by… until Jon Noremburg gave the answer in a comment to the above feeding video: the St. Andrews report comes from McIntosh.

This is unquestionably the giant of the race, and even now I am not quite satisfied about the limit of its growth, for after a severe storm in the spring of 1864 a specimen was thrown on shore at St. Andrews which half filled a dissecting jar eight inches wide and five inches deep. Thirty yards were measured without rupture, and yet the mass was not half uncoiled.

McIntosh (1873–1874: pg. 183)

Thirty yards (= 90 feet or 27 meters) is the measured length of a half-worm. Therefore, a whole worm measures double, 60 yards (= 180 feet or 55 meters). Right? Well… if the worm was partly in knots, how do we know that the measured part is actually half of the length? We don’t.

Calculating the volume of a worm

But the report has a crucial piece of information. The worm was said to fill half of an 8 by 5 inch jar (ca. 13 cm). With some basic math, we can calculate the volume of the worm and estimate its length from that. Assuming that the jar was cylindrical:

Radius (r) is 4 inches, and the height is 2.5 inches (half of the 5 inches jar). Thus, the volume of the worm equals:

Or converting to meters:

We can then assume the worm is a cylinder and estimate its height for any given diameter. The height will be the length of the worm.

The width of L. longissimus ranges from 2 to 10 mm. I used the formula above to calculate the estimated lengths of the famous St. Andrews worm:

The most conservative estimate (10 mm of diameter) results in an almost 30 m long worm, suggesting that the St. Andrews specimen might indeed have been over 30 m! How much longer is hard to say.

The specimens we have in the lab are between 1 and 4 mm wide, but most are below or near a meter long. It would be interesting to know how the body width scales with the body length in Lineus longissimus.

A worm as long as a blue whale

In any case, the St. Andrews specimen was at least 30 meters, which is a comparable size to the longest ocean giants—the Lion’s Mane Jellyfish (36.6 m) and the Blue Whale (33 m) (McClain et al. 2015). In favor of the nemertean, the volume estimation seems to corroborate his majestic length.

McClain and collaborators (2015) stress the difficulty of estimating the size of large marine animals. Lack of data, biased sampling, or simply feasibly measuring a 30 m animal complicates body size assessment. Nemerteans have an additional aggravating factor: they shorten or elongate with ease. Possibly, volume is a more accurate measure of body size for these slim worms.

The authors also highlight that the greatest reported size is quite different from the mean population size. This finding seems true for Lineus longissimus as well. Despite the largest 30–55 m estimate, most of the reports describe lengths not longer than 10 m, often ranging from 1 to 5 m. Which might show best the normal size distribution of Lineus longissimus populations.

The longest animal on Earth?

Sixty meters might be far-fetched, but there is relatively good evidence that this nemertean can reach—and maybe surpass—the impressive length of a blue whale, thus placing Lineus longissimus indeed among the world’s ocean giants.

References

Carwardine, M. (1995). The Guinness Book of Animal Records. Guinness World Records Limited.

McClain, C.R., Balk, M.A., Benfield, M.C., Branch, T.A., Chen, C., Cosgrove, J., Dove, A.D.M., Gaskins, L.C., Helm, R.R., Hochberg, F.G., Lee, F.B., Marshall, A., McMurray, S.E., Schanche, C., Stone, S.N. & Thaler, A.D. (2015). Sizing ocean giants: patterns of intraspecific size variation in marine megafauna. PeerJ 3, e715. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.715

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URL: https://brunovellutini.com/posts/lineus-longissimus-longest-animal/

#bibliography #biodiversity #biodiversityHeritageLibrary #invertebrate #lineusLongissimus #marineBiology #nemertea

Account of an Aurora Borealis

Stumbled upon this fine depiction of an Aurora Borealis while browsing some historical bryozoan literature in the Biodiversity Heritage Library:

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URL: https://brunovellutini.com/posts/account-aurora-borealis/

#bibliography #biodiversityHeritageLibrary #phd

Brachiopod historical hunt

Another historical hunt for brachiopods ended successfully at @BioDivLibrary :)

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URL: https://brunovellutini.com/posts/brachiopod-historical-hunt/

#bibliography #biodiversity #biodiversityHeritageLibrary #brachiopoda #invertebrate #marineBiology #tweet

Imported these digitally whitened hand-colored lithographs from and 1860 book - and also put together a biography of the author

#Wikipedia #BiodiversityHeritageLibrary

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerardus_Frederik_Westerman

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:De_toerako%27s