One worm wiggling is nothing special. But thousands wiggling in synch? That’s weird.
Peshkov and his colleagues first heard rumors of vinegar eels’ weird motions while studying the group movements of brine shrimp, another common aquarium dweller. Intrigued, they packed thousands ofThe nematodes first roamed randomly, but over the course of an hour, some began clustering in the middle. Others swarmed to the edges, where they circled the rim.
These collective undulations stirred up flows that prevented the water drop’s edge from contracting as it evaporated. But as evaporation progressed, the edge instead gradually tilted inwards, weakening the swarm’s outward push, until the walls finally began to close in. At this tipping point, the researchers measured the drop’s dimensions, which let them estimate that each vinegar eel generated 1 micronewton of force. They could move objects hundreds of times their own weight, Peshkov says.
It remains unclear why vinegar eels exhibit this bizarre behavior. “Nematodes are too small to observe in their natural environment,” says Serena Ding, a biologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany, who was not involved in the study. Figuring out the natural cause for this behavior is difficult using lab observations, since captive creatures act differently, she says.
Peshkov speculates vinegar eels might swarm tightly to minimize their bodies’ exposure to corrosive free radicals in water, or maybe they generate flows to move nutrients.
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