![]() As the naturalist John Graham Dalyell wrote in 1814, planarians could “almost be called immortal under the edge of the knife.” And if Collins needs more animals quickly, she can do with a scalpel what the worms do with their own muscles. Breeding them is a cinch: Given enough food, planarians will repeatedly double themselves by halving themselves. “It’s just mind-blowing,” Eva-Maria Collins of Swarthmore College, who studies these animals, told me. And even more miraculously, the tail regrows its head. Within days, the head piece grows a tail. After a few minutes of stretching and ripping, it separates into two halves-a head and a tail. The planarian begins as a small, flattened, sluglike creature with a spade-shaped head and two googly eyes. ![]() Others, more straightforwardly, tear themselves in two. When planarian flatworms want to reproduce, some have sex.
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