https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jlpeimmgyw
What do you do when food is low and you are a small millimeter? It turns out that the answer joins thousands of your comrades to make a tentacle superorganism that can fill the gaps towards nearby objects or grasp larger animals to transport you further.
Biologists who study the verses of nematodes in laboratories have long since known that they sometimes form “towers”, but these have not been studied in detail, explains Serena Ding at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany. So she and her colleagues did exactly that.
The team noted that worms like the largely studied Caenorhabditis Elegans are the most likely to form tricks when there is a large number, a shortage of food and a kind of structure so that they gather – in these experiments, a handful of toothbrush.
The worms have sometimes formed tricks in the absence of physical support, but these structures were not greater than 5 millimeters and lasted a minute. With a handle as a foundation, the towers reached 11 mm high and lasted up to half a day.
In other types of nematodes, there are turns of towers up to 50 mm high. “They can become super large,” says Ding.
While the base of a tower is stationary, the other end can extend beyond the support structure and move like a tentacle. For example, a tower can extend to a neighboring surface and form a bridge, allowing verses to move through the shortcomings much wider than any individual worm could not manage.
A “tower” of nematodes growing on a rotten apple
Perez et al. Current biology (2025)
The towers also enter objects that affect them, like the legs of fruit flies, which leads to part or all of each tower. In this way, worms could obtain a free journey to other places.
It is known that the verses of individual nematodes have coupling on insects, but it has not been demonstrated that whole towers can do so. “This is the alleged function that we could confirm,” explains Ding.
With the help of digital microscopes, the team also recorded towers on rotten apples in an orchard near the institute – the first time the behavior was observed in the wild.
The green towers are always formed by a single species even when many different species are present, has discovered the team, and they can be made up of worms at any active stage of their life cycle. Previously, it was thought that the towers were only made by “Dauer” worms – a hard larval stadium that forms when the conditions are stressful.
There are similar superorganisms. For example, mud molds are unicellular organisms similar to the amoeba which can come together to form larger bodies that move in search of food.
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