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flatworm
[ flat-wurm ]
noun
- any worm of the phylum Platyhelminthes, having bilateral symmetry and a soft, solid, usually flattened body, including the planarians, tapeworms, and trematodes; platyhelminth.
flatworm
/ ˈflætˌwɜːm /
noun
- any parasitic or free-living invertebrate of the phylum Platyhelminthes , including planarians, flukes, and tapeworms, having a flattened body with no circulatory system and only one opening to the intestine
flatworm
/ flăt′wûrm′ /
- Any of various parasitic and nonparasitic worms of the phylum Platyhelminthes, characteristically having a soft, flat, bilaterally symmetrical body. Flatworms lack a coelom (body cavity), respiratory system, and circulatory system, but are the most primitive invertebrates to have a brain. The evolutionary history of flatworms is uncertain, but they share some basic characteristics with rotifers, nematodes, and a few other invertebrate phyla. Cestodes (tapeworms), planarians, and trematodes (flukes) are flatworms.
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Example Sentences
Planarians are cross-eyed flatworms that biology students used to cut into pieces to study regeneration.
In one way, the flatworms “are better” than a sea slug, Yusa says.
In one sense, planarians, the little cross-eyed flatworms that biology students mince up to study regeneration, “are better,” Yusa says.
An initiative in Senegal, for example, will reintroduce edible native river prawns that prey on the snails that transmit the parasitic flatworm that causes schistosomiasis.
In the 1950s, an unknown psychology professor at the University of Michigan named James McConnell made headlines—and eventually became something of a celebrity—with a series of experiments on freshwater flatworms called planaria.
Such is seen in the life history of the liver fluke, a flatworm which kills sheep, and in the tapeworm.
A certain fresh-water flatworm has the mouth and pharynx in the middle of the body.
The parasite that's doing the damage is a flatworm, a trematode called Hepatodirus hominis.
If a flatworm be cut in two, the front piece grows out a new tail, the hind piece a new head, and two perfect worms result.
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