Latest news with #nematodes
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Incredible behaviour of tiny creatures filmed in world-first: 'Beauty overrides the disgust'
In a world-first, tiny worms have been filmed building towers so they can latch onto passing insects. The strategy has been developed to avoid fierce competition when food runs out, allowing them to travel large distances and find new locations to plunder. Although most people have never heard of nematode worms, they've probably accidentally eaten one. As a group, they are the most abundant creatures on Earth, and the species at the centre of the study are just 1mm-long and prey on bacteria that grows on rotting apples and pears. The research was conducted by the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour, which dubbed the behaviour a 'rare example of collective hitchhiking in nature' because only slime moulds, fire ants, and spider mites had been known to operate like this. The worms slither over each other, spiralling their bodies to form a living tower which can sense touch as insects brush by, causing them to detach. The study's group leader, Dr Serena Ding spoke to Yahoo News Australia from her lab in Germany this week, explaining that without their insect hosts, the worms would struggle to travel large distances because their moist bodies would dry out and they'd die. Ding finds the nematodes 'beautiful', although she's well aware that others find them gross. 'I can understand that reaction as well, I've had that reaction to other kinds of worms,' she said. Related: 🦟 'Unimaginable' theory emerges about desolate continent Others have also clearly seen the beauty in the translucent nematode species she's studying – its name C. elegans relates to its 'elegant movement'. 'To me, they're not the disgusting type. When they come together to give you beautiful patterns, and fascinating behaviour to look at the beauty side overrides the disgust,' she said. 📸 Tourists to see 'extinct' animals behind national park's 25km predator-free fence 🚨 281 experts call for ban of 'toxic' product sold at Coles, Bunnings, Woolworths, Mitre 10 😳 Beach find highlights dark side of Queensland's $88 million tourism pledge It had long been known that nematodes created towers, but this is the first time the behaviour had been studied in detail. The Max Planck team first observed the worms forming themselves into a superorganism in an orchard and then waving in unison, trying to find a passing fruit fly. 'For so long natural worm towers existed only in our imaginations. But with the right equipment and lots of curiosity, we found them hiding in plain sight,' Ding said ahead of the paper's release. Postdoctoral Researcher Daniela Perez then collected nematodes to film them in her lab. Within two hours of placing them in a food-free environment they began to form towers, which were capable of standing for 12 hours. During this time they would form exploratory arms and bridges to reach new spaces. 'A nematode tower is not just a pile of worms. It's a coordinated structure, a superorganism in motion,' Perez said. 'The towers are actively sensing and growing. When we touched them, they responded immediately, growing toward the stimulus and attaching to it,' she added. Love Australia's weird and wonderful environment? 🐊🦘😳 Get our new newsletter showcasing the week's best stories.
CTV News
4 days ago
- Science
- CTV News
First evidence of ‘living towers' made of worms discovered in nature
A 10-millimetre (0.4-inch) nematode tower twists and folds as the mass of worms reaches for the lid of its petri dish. (Perez et al. 2025/Current Biology via CNN Newsource) Nature seems to offer an escape from the hustle and bustle of city life, but the world at your feet may tell another story. Even in the shade of a fruit tree, you could be surrounded by tiny skyscrapers — not made of steel or concrete, but of microscopic worms wriggling and writhing into the shape of long, vertical towers. Even though these miniature architects, called nematodes, are found all over Earth's surface, scientists in Germany recently witnessed their impressive building techniques in nature for the first time. After months of closely inspecting rotten pears and apples in local orchards, researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and the University of Konstanz were able to spot hundreds of the 1-millimetre-long (0.04-inch) worms climbing onto one another, amassing structures up to 10 times their individual size. To learn more about the mysterious physics of the soft, slimy towers, the study team brought samples of nematodes called Caenorhabditis elegans into a lab and analyzed them. There, the scientists noticed the worms could assemble in a matter of hours, with some reaching out from the twisting mass as exploratory 'arms' sensing the environment and building accordingly. But why the worms formed the structures wasn't immediately clear. The team's findings, published Thursday in the journal Current Biology, show that even the smallest animals can prompt big questions about the evolutionary purpose of social behaviours. 'What we got was more than just some worms standing on top of each other,' said senior study author Serena Ding, a Max Planck research group leader of genes and behaviour. 'It's a coordinated superorganism, acting and moving as a whole.' Living towers: A closer look To find out what was motivating the nematodes' building behaviour, the study team tested the worms' reactions to being poked, prodded and even visited by a fly — all while stacked in a tower formation. 'We saw that they are very reactive to the presence of a stimulus,' said the study's first author, Daniela Perez, who is a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. 'They sense it, and then the tower goes towards this stimulus, attaching itself to our metal pick or a fly buzzing around.' This coordinated reaction suggests the hungry nematodes may be joining together to easily hitch a ride on larger animals such as insects that transport them to (not so) greener pastures with more rotten fruit to feast on, Perez said. 'If you think about it, an animal that is 1 millimetre long cannot just crawl all the way to the next fruit 2 metres (6.6 feet) away. It could easily die on the way there, or be eaten by a predator,' Perez explained. Nematodes are capable of hitchhiking solo too, she added, but arriving to a new area in a group may allow them to continue reproducing. The structures themselves may also serve as a mode of transport, as evidenced by how some worms formed bridges across gaps within the petri dishes to get from one surface to another, Perez noted. 'This discovery is really exciting,' said Orit Peleg, an associate professor of computer science who studies living systems at the University of Colorado Boulder's BioFrontiers Institute. 'It's both establishing the ecological function of creating a tower, and it really opens up the door to do more controlled experimentation to try to understand the perceptual world of these organisms, and how they communicate within a large group.' Peleg was not involved in the study. The unknowns in stacks of worms As the next step, Perez said her team would like to learn whether the formation of these structures is a cooperative or competitive behaviour. In other words, are the towering nematodes behaving socially to help each other out, or are their towers more akin to a Black Friday sale stampede? Studying the behaviours of other self-assembling creatures could offer clues to the social norms of nematodes and help answer this question, Ding said. Ryan Greenway Study coauthor Ryan Greenway, a technical assistant at Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany, sets up a field microscope that could record videos of the natural worm towers. (Serena Ding via CNN Newsource) Ants, which assemble to form buoyant rafts to survive floodwaters, are among the few creatures known to team up like nematodes, said David Hu, a professor of mechanical engineering and biology at Georgia Tech. Hu was not involved in the study. 'Ants are incredibly sacrificial for one another, and they do not generally fight within the colony,' Hu said. 'That's because of their genetics. They all come from the same queen, so they are like siblings.' Like ants, nematodes didn't appear to display any obvious role differentiation or hierarchy within the tower structures, Perez said. Each worm from the base to the top of the structure was equally mobile and strong, indicating no competition was at play. However, the lab-cultivated worms were basically clones of one another, so it's not clear whether role differentiation occurs more often in nature, where nematode populations could have more genetic differences, she noted. Additionally, socially co-operative creatures tend to use some form of communication, Peleg said. In the case of ants, it may be their pheromone trails, while honeybees rely on their ritual dance routines and slime molds use their pulsing chemical signals. With nematodes, however, it's still not clear how they might communicate — or if they are communicating at all, Ding said. 'The next steps for (the team) are really just choosing the next questions to ask.' Notably, there has been a lot of interest in studying cooperative animal behaviours among the robotics community, Hu said. It's possible that one day, he added, information about the complex sociality of creatures like nematodes could be used to inform how technology, such as computer servers or drone systems, communicates. By Kameryn Griesser, CNN
CNN
4 days ago
- General
- CNN
First evidence of ‘living towers' made of worms discovered in nature
Nature seems to offer an escape from the hustle and bustle of city life, but the world at your feet may tell another story. Even in the shade of a fruit tree, you could be surrounded by tiny skyscrapers — not made of steel or concrete, but of microscopic worms wriggling and writhing into the shape of long, vertical towers. Even though these miniature architects, called nematodes, are found all over Earth's surface, scientists in Germany recently witnessed their impressive building techniques in nature for the first time. After months of closely inspecting rotten pears and apples in local orchards, researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and the University of Konstanz were able to spot hundreds of the 1-millimeter-long (0.04-inch) worms climbing onto one another, amassing structures up to 10 times their individual size. Related video Rare video shows 12 sharks co-feed socially To learn more about the mysterious physics of the soft, slimy towers, the study team brought samples of nematodes called Caenorhabditis elegans into a lab and analyzed them. There, the scientists noticed the worms could assemble in a matter of hours, with some reaching out from the twisting mass as exploratory 'arms' sensing the environment and building accordingly. But why the worms formed the structures wasn't immediately clear. The team's findings, published Thursday in the journal Current Biology, show that even the smallest animals can prompt big questions about the evolutionary purpose of social behaviors. 'What we got was more than just some worms standing on top of each other,' said senior study author Serena Ding, a Max Planck research group leader of genes and behavior. 'It's a coordinated superorganism, acting and moving as a whole.' To find out what was motivating the nematodes' building behavior, the study team tested the worms' reactions to being poked, prodded and even visited by a fly — all while stacked in a tower formation. 'We saw that they are very reactive to the presence of a stimulus,' said the study's first author, Daniela Perez, who is a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. 'They sense it, and then the tower goes towards this stimulus, attaching itself to our metal pick or a fly buzzing around.' This coordinated reaction suggests the hungry nematodes may be joining together to easily hitch a ride on larger animals such as insects that transport them to (not so) greener pastures with more rotten fruit to feast on, Perez said. 'If you think about it, an animal that is 1 millimeter long cannot just crawl all the way to the next fruit 2 meters (6.6 feet) away. It could easily die on the way there, or be eaten by a predator,' Perez explained. Nematodes are capable of hitchhiking solo too, she added, but arriving to a new area in a group may allow them to continue reproducing. The structures themselves may also serve as a mode of transport, as evidenced by how some worms formed bridges across gaps within the petri dishes to get from one surface to another, Perez noted. 'This discovery is really exciting,' said Orit Peleg, an associate professor of computer science who studies living systems at the University of Colorado Boulder's BioFrontiers Institute. 'It's both establishing the ecological function of creating a tower, and it really opens up the door to do more controlled experimentation to try to understand the perceptual world of these organisms, and how they communicate within a large group.' Peleg was not involved in the study. As the next step, Perez said her team would like to learn whether the formation of these structures is a cooperative or competitive behavior. In other words, are the towering nematodes behaving socially to help each other out, or are their towers more akin to a Black Friday sale stampede? Studying the behaviors of other self-assembling creatures could offer clues to the social norms of nematodes and help answer this question, Ding said. Ants, which assemble to form buoyant rafts to survive floodwaters, are among the few creatures known to team up like nematodes, said David Hu, a professor of mechanical engineering and biology at Georgia Tech. Hu was not involved in the study. 'Ants are incredibly sacrificial for one another, and they do not generally fight within the colony,' Hu said. 'That's because of their genetics. They all come from the same queen, so they are like siblings.' Like ants, nematodes didn't appear to display any obvious role differentiation or hierarchy within the tower structures, Perez said. Each worm from the base to the top of the structure was equally mobile and strong, indicating no competition was at play. However, the lab-cultivated worms were basically clones of one another, so it's not clear whether role differentiation occurs more often in nature, where nematode populations could have more genetic differences, she noted. Additionally, socially cooperative creatures tend to use some form of communication, Peleg said. In the case of ants, it may be their pheromone trails, while honeybees rely on their ritual dance routines and slime molds use their pulsing chemical signals. With nematodes, however, it's still not clear how they might communicate — or if they are communicating at all, Ding said. 'The next steps for (the team) are really just choosing the next questions to ask.' Notably, there has been a lot of interest in studying cooperative animal behaviors among the robotics community, Hu said. It's possible that one day, he added, information about the complex sociality of creatures like nematodes could be used to inform how technology, such as computer servers or drone systems, communicates.
Gizmodo
4 days ago
- Health
- Gizmodo
Worms Caught Building Flesh Towers in the Wild
Scientists have just discovered something most of us probably would've been fine never knowing: wild nematodes—also known as roundworms—love to climb on top of each other to build fleshy, writhing towers. Researchers in Germany detailed their discovery in a new study published Thursday in Current Biology. They found and videotaped several nematode species, living out in the wild, organizing into these living worm towers—a phenomenon previously only seen in the lab. The findings also show that the microscopic worms use these structures to climb onto animals or objects that can bring them elsewhere, though there remain many other questions about the practice. According to senior study author Serena Ding, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, the towers are hardly a secret among the worm science community. But the behavior had reached a sort of mythical status, since no one had ever documented it in wild nematodes. That could have meant the worms are only compelled to build towers under lab conditions, which might have limited the usefulness of any research on the behavior. 'It's just something that always bugged me. I mean, yes, we're studying nematode collective behavior in the tower context and other contexts, but is it real?' Ding, the leader of a lab focused on nematode research at Max Planck, told Gizmodo. 'So when I started my research program four years ago, I really dedicated a push towards just actually finding nematodes at a high density and high numbers doing this stuff out there. And then we were successful.' It ultimately took months for Ding's colleagues, particularly co-author Ryan Greenway, to find and record instances of natural worm tower building in the decaying fruits strewn across the orchards near the University of Konstanz (one of three locations where the Institute is based). Once the towers were found, the researchers brought some into the lab for further study. They also encouraged and studied the creation of worm towers in the lab with Caenorhabditis elegans, a species frequently used for research. 'There's the important finding of, 'Yes, they do exist.' But the second finding is that we actually confirm the towers can serve to disperse individuals at the same time,' Ding said. 'This [has] always been thought of as a dispersal behavior, but nobody's really confirmed it.' The researchers observed the worms in these towers latching onto animals like fruit flies passing them by, for instance, or using them as a sort of bridge to cross otherwise unreachable gaps. Moreover, the towers appeared to collectively respond to stimuli like being touched. The fruits contained loads of nematodes, but the towers themselves were always made of only one species at a time. All of this suggests that these living buildings should be seen as temporary 'superorganisms,' similar to slime molds or certain ants. Though Ding and her team did hope and expect to find the worm towers in nature, they were surprised in other ways. The researchers found no evidence of the lab worms taking on different roles inside the tower, for one. The worms were equally mobile, and none appeared to have an advantage over others in becoming the head of the tower (i.e. the part that most benefits from this behavior). These worms are clonal, however, meaning they're practically identical to each other genetically. And it's possible that things aren't quite so chummy among more distantly-related worms in the wild. 'These are active directions which we're trying to follow up on right now, because not everybody gets to disperse. So who gets to disperse? Are they helping each other? Are they cheating?' Ding said. There are other questions left to be answered about these towers. The team's lab experiments showed that C. elegans worms were capable of building towers throughout their lives, for instance, including adulthood. Previous research had suggested this behavior was only performed by dauer worms—a larval stage of life some worms adopt to survive harsher environments. At the same time, the natural towers they found were only made out of dauer worms, so maybe there's something else that makes the behavior more common during that stage of life. This research is only the start for Ding and her team, since they plan to pursue these mysteries further. But Ding hopes her team's work can already impart a valuable lesson, especially to other worm researchers. She notes worms like C. elegans are commonly altered in the lab so scientists can track how certain behaviors might work on the molecular level. But she argues that there's also still plenty more to be learned from studying them out in the real world. 'What I'm trying to do is to take really well-known organisms but study them from a more natural perspective. I want to understand not just how the behavior is generated, but also what the behavior means for the animal from a more ecological and evolutionarily relevant perspective,' she said. 'At least for me, this is an important study where as a worm person, I can publish a study without using a single mutant and we're just looking at the behavior, and what those behaviors say. For me, that's super exciting.' Personally, I'm just glad I now have more frightening trivia to bring up at my next party.
The Sun
16-05-2025
- Science
- The Sun
Banish garden pests with a Nemasys Bundle
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