~ quintessential beauty in a North Carolina sewer

Allow me to share with you the current object of my professional interest. This footage brushes the thematic core of all my work. It is said to have been taken with a snake-cam in the sewers of North Carolina



These clits of pink mucilage might have been spat from the bronchial tubes of a tuberculosis victim, yet they are plainly, horribly alive - as their weird peristaltic spasms attest. Notice how their substance seems to melt beneath the light, then recombine, always moving, writhing. Each a wet succulent bolus of undeniable charisma ... Performing unknowable functions, describing secret processes, slow emulsive calculations in the darkness and moisture, latent meaning in the clotted, palpitating slime... I particularly like the second creature, which, rather than flinching, appears to actually threaten the source of illumination. (Notice that the controller of the camera is aware of their photosensitivity and positions the light for effect.) Regard the extrusions of striated flesh with which the creatures attach themselves to the concrete; this is how human muscle fixes to the bone.

In the undisturbed dark, growing fat and strong on the rich never-failing stream of effluent, on the slow seepage of human waste… In an environment so abundant, so wonderfully replete with the building blocks of life … I can imagine that these creatures originated here and nowhere else. That the spark of life from which they have evolved is not the spark from which the rest of nature descends.

Forgive my language. The subject compels me to lyricism ...

Feasting. Growing fat and strong…

Or were they once creatures of another order, forced into the deeps by predators or environmental cataclysm. At what point did they abandon their skin? Or if not their skin, their shells?

Indeed, if forced to guess, I would have said they were molluscs which had abandoned their shells. Others, excluding the breathless cryptozoologists, have suggested that the entities are, variously, bryozoans (something like coral), cnidarians ( the phylum containing jellyfish, sea anemones and coral) or slime molds. Some suggest the video is promoting what could only be a horror movie.

For some prosaic background info try here.

For an expert opinion, courtesy of Deep Sea News, try this:

“They are clumps of annelid worms, almost certainly tubificids. Normally these occur in soil and sediment, especially at the bottom and edges of polluted streams. In the photo they have apparently entered a pipeline somehow, and in the absence of soil they are coiling around each other. The contractions you see are the result of a single worm contracting and then stimulating all the others to do the same almost simultaneously, so it looks like a single big muscle contracting.”

Hmmn …

Or were they once … men?