The Common Lugworm is a segmented worm that can be pink, red, green, brown or black. It can be seen all along the English coast where there are muddy shorelines and also in sheltered estuaries, but it is very rarely seen because it lives in burrows. The burrows can be ‘U’ or ‘J’ shaped and can be as deep as twenty to forty centimetres.
The Common Lugworm can grow up to twenty centimetres long and it has a firm body. Its head is quite small and holds no eyes. The middle part of its body has segments with tiny ‘parapods’ which are like little-legs covered in bristles. Its abdomen is narrower than the rest of the body and has lots of segments without the parapods. The Common Lugworm also has a ‘proboscis’ which is a long thread-like tubular organ which shoots out of the worm’s mouth when it wants to feed.
Female Lugworms lay their eggs in burrows and when the larvae hatch out of the eggs, they crawl to the surface where they are taken to different locations by water currents. The larvae eventually settle on the sand and live inside tubes made out of mucus for about two months. Then they drift in the water again before they eventually settle on the sand again to make burrows of their own and to develop into adult Common Lugworms.