Absurd Creature of the Week: The Legless Amphibian That Eats Its Mother’s Skin

That’s no earthworm—it’s a vertebrate, specifically a kind of amphibian called a caecilian. But you can call it an earthworm if you want. I’m not gonna stop you. © Michael & Patricia Fogden/CORBIS

Perhaps the most contentious title out there is “World’s Greatest Mom.” My mother probably thinks she is, but so too does her mother, and I think they could both make pretty strong cases. But the sacrifices that human moms make pale in comparison to what’s going on in nature. There’s a bug, for instance, whose young devour their mother from the inside out. And one species of deep-sea octopus looks after her eggs for an incredible four and a half years, then perishes.

More absurd creatures:

The Beautiful Undersea Raver That Digests Its Victims Alive

The Ferocious Bug That Sucks Prey Dry and Wears Their Corpses

This Marsupial Has Marathon Sex Until It Goes Blind and Drops Dead

One amphibian, though, goes about things a little more creepily: A caecilian (pronounced suh-SILL-ee-in) momma lets her kids eat her skin. Like, a lot of it. They’ve even got specialized baby teeth to more efficiently strip her skin away.

That alone is enough to win the caecilian a spot in this column, but pretty much everything about the caecilian is goofy. First of all, they have no legs, not even vestigial traces of limbs (they look just like that giant space slug that almost ate the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars —in fact I’d be surprised if the monster wasn’t inspired by caecilians). They reproduce in pretty much every way imaginable. Et cetera, et cetera.

The 200 or so species of caecilians range from just a few inches long to over 3 feet, and they live in tropical habitats all over the world, rummaging around in the leaf litter or burrowing or even taking to the water. Many species have tiny eyes, or their eye sockets are covered with bone, since peepers don’t do you no good nohow when you’re underground. It makes more sense for the structure to atrophy away over evolutionary time—an eye that isn’t there can’t get infected. Same goes for the legs. It takes a whole lot of valuable time and energy and resources to build those things.