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Spring rains often bring dozens of earthworms to the surface, where they twist on the ground and sidewalks. But recently heavy rains in a town near New York were followed by something a little more unusual: a worm.
A resident of Hoboken, New Jersey, was out for a morning walk in a park near the Hudson River on March 25, when she spotted hundreds of worms spread along the walkway. The woman, who asked not to be identified, told Live Science that after her initial surprise she noticed something even more bizarre – a number of worms had formed a cyclone shape, creating a spiral where the edge of the grass met the concrete. .
The woman took the photos and sent them to Tiffanie Fisher, a member of Hoboken City Council, who shared the images of the “worm tornado” on Facebook. “It’s clear that the worms come out after the rain, but it’s something I’ve never seen!” Fisher wrote in the post.
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When the photographer saw the worm tornado, they weren’t actively spiraling, although individual worms still squirmed in place, she told Live Science. There were no open pipes nearby, and although most of the worms were spread out in a large vortex, there were many worms extending beyond the outer curve of the worm; they clung to the wall of a nearby building and sank along the sidewalk and into the road, the woman said.
While it’s tempting to imagine the worms lining up in a vortex in preparation for the Worm moon – the super moon that lit up the night sky a few days later on March 28 – the spiral is unlikely to be a lunar ceremony. So what was the weird wormnado?
Worms breathe through their skin, so when heavy or persistent rain saturates the soil with water, the worms must tunnel to the surface or risk drowning, according to the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Earthworms are usually solitary, but they sometimes flock when they are on the surface. The worms congregate in groups and communicate with each other to find out where to move, researchers reported in 2010 in the International Journal of Behavioral Biology.
Scientists in this study found that earthworms in the species Eisenia fetida would cluster and “influence each other to choose a common direction during their migration,” and they did so using tactile rather than chemical signals. This collective behavior could help earthworms survive environmental threats, such as flooding or arid soils, and could also be a defense strategy against predators or pathogens, according to the study.
An exceptional example of earthworm breeding was captured on video in 2015 by rangers at Eisenhower State Park in Denison, Texas. In images posted to Texas Parks and Wildlife Youtube channel, several huge masses of pink earthworms wriggle on a road.
“The recent flooding may have made this herd behavior stand out,” park officials wrote in a description video.
But the cause of the Hoboken worm is less clear. “This form of tornado is really interesting,” said Kyungsoo Yoo, professor in the Department of Soil, Water, and Climate at the University of Minnesota. Yoo is studying how invasive earthworms transform forest ecosystems, and although worms are known to emerge en masse from the ground after rain, he had never seen them spiral before, Yoo told Live Science in a letter. electronic.
Aquatic worms, such as the California black worm (Lumbriculus variegatus), can form a huge living node – known as a gout – of up to 50,000 worms when threatened by dry conditions, according to “Worm blobs, “a comic strip created by the Bhamla Lab at Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and illustrated by artist Lindsey Leigh. A tight worm drop is less likely to dry out than a single worm, and the worms pull and push to move the drop, the Bhamla Lab researchers wrote in the comic.
Laboratory chief Saad Bhamla, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech, suggested in an email that sudden changes in soil water, in combination with the shape of the landscape, could explain the appearance of a spiral worm. .
“The ground could be submerged,” Bhamla told Live Science in an email. “If the water flowed this way after a flood, the worms could follow a water gradient.” It’s hard to tell the worm species apart from the photos, but Bhamla and her colleagues have observed this type of behavior in the aquatic black worms they study, which form massive spots.
“We saw them following water tracks and forming all kinds of paths and aggregate structures,” Bhamla said. “These aggregations happen after the water leaves.” However, since it is not known what type of worms spiraled, any conclusion about their behavior would be speculation, Bhamla added.
Local weather reports described heavy rain the night before the photos were taken – about 2.5 centimeters in all. “It would have resulted in the release of a lot of earthworms from the soil for the air,” Harry Tuazon, a doctoral student in Georgia Tech’s interdisciplinary bioengineering graduate program, told Live Science in an email. .
“I think the circular pattern is much more indicative of water drainage and swept worms, rather than a type of behavioral locomotion,” Tuazon said. “Maybe a sinkhole is forming? It would be interesting if a bunch of earthworms provided telltale signs of a sinkhole forming!”
In any case, what may have caused the Hoboken worm did not last. When the woman who photographed him returned to the park a few hours later, the whirlwind was gone.
“There were still a lot of worms all over the walls, sidewalk, sidewalk and road. But most of it was gone – I don’t know where they went,” she said.
Originally posted on Live Science.
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