Our attention to worms is often marked by reluctance, if not fear and revulsion. After all, most of us have accidentally stepped on an earthworm — or if we're unlucky, have had to think about the kinds that take uninvited refuge in our intestines. Now consider that a lesser known species, the Australian velvet worm, lives according to a social hierarchy led by an alpha female. These creatures consistently demonstrate dynamics interpreted as dominance and subordination through biting, chasing, and climbing. 

Phylogenically, worms are supposedly “simple” organisms. But such categorization seems to have prevented us from paying attention to differences between myriad species within that evolutionary family — in fact, velvet worms are closer to spiders (arthropods) or tardigrades than the scientific worm (annelid)! More importantly, comparisons between common traits tend to elude the way organisms navigate life in ways that resist human characterization. We might question whether comparing velvet worm behavior to human ones is meaningful at all — what kind of attention would we give to velvet worms, if we could do so on "their terms"?

To read more about Velvet Worms, see here and here.