Evidence reveals the existence of natural structures, dubbed 'living towers,' constructed primarily by worms in an undisclosed environment.
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Stepping away from the urban jungle reveals an unseen world beneath your feet. It's a realm where minuscule skyscrapers rise, not crafted from steel and concrete, but formed by microscopic worms—nematodes—twisting and turning into vertical towers.
These silent city builders, observed in nature for the first time by researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and the University of Konstanz, are omnipresent on Earth's surface. Investigating rotten fruits in local orchards for months, these scientists finally managed to spot clusters of 1-millimeter-long (0.04-inch) nematodes assembling columns up to 10 times their individual size.
To delve deeper into the mysteries of these colony-like structures, the researchers brought samples of a species called Caenorhabditis elegans into the lab for examination. They discovered that these worms could construct leaning towers within hours, with sections reaching out to sense the environment, adjust, and build accordingly. However, the purpose behind this architectural endeavor remained uncertain.
The team's findings, released in the journal Current Biology on Thursday, pose questions about the evolutionary reason for social behaviors, even in miniature organisms.
"[What] we got was more than just worms standing on top of each other," stated 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."
🏢 Living Towers: A Closer Look
To understand the motivation behind the building behavior of the nematodes, the research team tested the worms' reactions to various stimuli while stacked together within the towers. Their findings demonstrate that the nematodes are highly reactive to stimuli, commonly directing their towers towards them, such as flies or metal picks.
This responsiveness indicates that the nematodes may be utilizing the towers as transportation vehicles, hitching a ride on larger animals, like insects, which carry them towards new food sources. According to the study's first author, Daniela Perez, "[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."
The structures themselves also serve as a means of transportation, as evident in the worms' abilities to form bridges across gaps within petri dishes, enabling them to travel from one surface to another more efficiently.
Orit Peleg, an associate professor of computer science from the University of Colorado Boulder's BioFrontiers Institute, expressed excitement about the discovery, commenting, "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."
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- The study published in the journal Current Biology reveals that nematode worms, observed by researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and the University of Konstanz, construct tall towers for both transportation and potential predator protection in health-and-wellness sensitive environments like local orchards.
- Intriguing science news from CNN's Wonder Theory suggests that the latest findings in the field of science and health-and-wellness indicate these silent city builders, namely nematodes, might be using their towers for fitness-and-exercise purposes, as they navigate the environment and travel efficiently to potential food sources.
- With space-and-astronomy lovers always eager for discoveries that challenge human understanding, the unveiling of these architectural feats by nematodes compels us to question whether such communal behaviors could evolve elsewhere in the universe, showcasing the unexpected connections between our own world and the cosmos.
