Science News Hubb
Advertisement
  • Home
  • Science News
  • Technology
  • Contact us
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Science News
  • Technology
  • Contact us
No Result
View All Result
Science News Hubb
No Result
View All Result
Home Science News

Blobs of worms untangle in milliseconds with a corkscrew wiggle

admin by admin
April 28, 2023
in Science News


New Scientist Default Image

A ball of entangled worms

Harry Tuazon/Georgia Institute of Technology

Worms that create intricate, tangled blobs with their bodies can disentangle in milliseconds when threatened. This speedy unscrambling is possible because each worm wriggles in a special corkscrew motion.

California blackworms (Lumbriculus variegatus) tangle their bodies into knotted “worm blobs” to preserve moisture during droughts. In the wild, these balls can contain up to 50,000 worms. It takes the animals a few minutes to form a blob, but when Harry Tuazon at the Georgia Institute of Technology shined ultraviolet (UV) light on one of these twisted-up worm balls in the lab he was shocked to see the worms disentangle in just a few tens of milliseconds.

He and his colleagues wanted to understand how the worms were extricating themselves from the blob a hundred times more quickly than they formed it. They used ultrasound to look inside blobs of about 20 worms and determine the details of their structure, such as how many times each worm coiled around another. To do this, they encased the blob in gelatine so the worms would wriggle less. Next, they put the blob in a shallow container of water, scared the worms with electric shocks or UV light and then filmed the rapid disentangling, with researchers manually tracking the trajectory of each animal’s head.

When UV light is shined on the worms, they fling themselves apart

Harry Tuazon

The team also collaborated with mathematicians who specialise in the theory of knots. These researchers used data from the observations to construct a mathematical model and run computer simulations, which revealed that the key difference between the worms’ slow entangling and rapid disentangling was the direction in which each animal performed a type of helical wriggle.

Repeating a corkscrew motion in one direction for a while and then abruptly switching directions leads to tangling, but quickly alternating between corkscrewing left and right efficiently disentangles the blob, says Vishal Patil at Stanford University in California.

New Scientist Default Image

The corkscrew motion individual worms use to disentangle themselves from the worm ball

Georgia Institute of Technology

“I would have thought that, mathematically, disentangling isn’t really a solvable problem because it’s so complex, but then Harry and colleagues showed us these videos and it was like, if worms can solve this problem, so can we,” he says.

This new understanding of how blackworms morph from a tight blob to being more dispersed may help researchers eventually achieve the “dream of creating a material that can do stuff by itself” says Antoine Deblais at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. In the future, materials made from tangled soft filaments could become looser and more bendable, or harder and more compact, if those filaments could be made to wriggle like the worms, he says.

Topics:



Source link

Tags: animal behaviourphysicsworms
Previous Post

Russia agrees to stay aboard International Space Station through 2028

Next Post

Here are 5 cool findings from a massive project on 240 mammal genomes

Next Post

Here are 5 cool findings from a massive project on 240 mammal genomes

Recommended

Global Warming Is Likely to Breach the 1.5 Degrees C Milestone within 5 Years

May 18, 2023

Tiny bubbles that make icicles hazy are filled with water, not air

January 8, 2023

Don't miss it

Technology

Canadian Wildfire Smoke Was So Widespread it Was Visible From Nearly a Million Miles Away

May 28, 2023
Technology

A Complete Guide to Absorbance and Fluorescence Quantification

May 28, 2023
Science News

Why the 2023 Atlantic hurricane season is especially hard to predict

May 27, 2023
Science News

IBD: We may finally know why psychological stress worsens gut inflammation

May 27, 2023
Science News

Disney’s Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser hotel will go Dark (Side), cease operations

May 27, 2023
Technology

Thousands of New Creatures Discovered in Deep-Sea Mining Zone

May 27, 2023

© Science News Hubb All rights reserved.

Use of these names, logos, and brands does not imply endorsement unless specified. By using this site, you agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.

Navigate Site

  • Home
  • Science News
  • Technology
  • Contact us

Newsletter Sign Up

No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Science News
  • Technology
  • Contact us

© 2022 Science News Hubb All rights reserved.