Fascinating discovery: Nematodes form towers in nature!

Fascinating discovery: Nematodes form towers in nature!

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Biology and the University of Konstanz have made an impressive discovery regarding nematodes, the most numerous animals on earth. In an orchard, tower formations of these microscopic creatures were documented in fallen apples and pears. This phenomenon has so far only been observed in the laboratory and represents the first direct evidence of the natural occurrence of worm towers. According to campus.uni-konstanz.de Under conditions of food shortage and competition, the nematodes formed towers that consisted only of a special nematode species in the larval stage, the so-called “dauer larvae”.

Ryan Greenway, a leading researcher, used a digital microscope to examine these worm towers. The towers move synchronously in a unified wave and show amazing reactions to the touch of the environment. They have the ability to detach from surfaces and attach to insects such as fruit flies. These observations open up new possibilities for the study of group territory in animals and collective locomotion in nature.

Innovative research on Caenorhabditis elegans

Adopted research models in this area, particularly using the example of Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans), a 1 mm long nematode, show that this worm serves as an ideal study subject for locomotion due to its simple nervous system and complex behaviors. A major study analyzed different types of movement, including swimming in liquids and crawling on solid media, and concluded that these activities cannot be qualitatively separated from one another, but rather represent variants of a single movement pattern. These findings were presented in an article pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov shown.

Research also shows that environmental forces play only a minimal role in locomotion, making internal forces more central to locomotion. The results indicate that C. elegans is not energy limited in its ability to move, which contradicts previous assumptions of a certain power saturation.

Collective behaviors and genetic variants

Another important aspect of nematode research is the analysis of genetic mutations and their influence on various behavioral changes. Particular attention is paid to the interaction of behavioral phenotypes at both the individual and group levels. The experiments aim to characterize genetically different nematode strains and explore their specific behaviors in different environments. This is supported in comprehensive studies by modern technologies such as computational ethology and feature extraction algorithms, as on ab.mpg.de described.

Three interaction rules were discovered that lead to different aggregation behaviors between C. elegans strains. This aggregation behavior, considered one of the most studied collective behaviors of nematodes, is the focus of further research that could provide exciting insights into the social behavior of these organisms.

The combination of these diverse research fields and observations on nematodes opens up a wealth of possibilities for understanding the complex interplay between genetics and behavior in natural contexts. The ongoing studies could have far-reaching implications for our knowledge of collective interactions in the animal world.