If you’ve ever walked through a fruit orchard, you might have been steps away from a living tower of worms.
That’s what researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and the University of Konstanz in Germany found when they inspected rotten pears and apples.
Hundreds of the microscopic worms, called nematodes, climbed on top of one another to form structures 10 times their size — even making a twisting “arm” to sense the environment — leading scientists to question what’s driving the behavior.
“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.”
Discoveries
These stories will pique your curiosity:
— For over a century, astronomers thought the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies would collide in 4.5 billion years, but new telescope observations may change that. However, another galaxy could entangle with ours sooner.
— Archaeologists who uncovered the remains of an ancient Mayan complex in Guatemala named the site after two humanlike rock figures that are believed to represent an “ancestral couple,” according to the country’s Ministry of Culture and Sport.
— A fossil of the earliest known bird that was kept in a private collection for decades has provided scientists with “one ‘Wow!’ after another,” including the first flight feathers seen in an Archaeopteryx specimen, said Dr. Jingmai O’Connor, associate curator of fossil reptiles at the Field Museum.
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