Worm uses electricity from other animals to jump – 06/30/2023 – Science
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The worms of the species Caenorhabditis elegans they measure, at most, 1 millimeter in length, which, of course, does not help much when they try to move over great distances. Unable to crawl very far, the critters figured out how to make “electric jumps”, hitching a ride on the natural electricity produced by other animals, such as flying insects.
Identified in a series of experiments carried out by Japanese scientists, the unusual trick is probably behind the surprising ability to disperse the C. elegans. A Electric hitchhiking would explain, for example, how they manage to adhere to the bodies of larger animals, which, in turn, carry the worms to places they would never be able to reach on their own.
Although the ability of invertebrates sounds like the stuff of science fiction, the first clue that they were capable of some very unorthodox form of locomotion came from an extremely simple observation. The team led by Takuma Sugi, from the University of Hiroshima, noticed something odd when monitoring the development of the little worms in Petri dishes (“little dishes” in the laboratory where it is common to cultivate small organisms).
It happens that, sometimes, although the C. elegans were growing at the bottom of the Petri dishes, where their food was, some individuals of the species, suddenly, ended up on the lid of the container, at a considerable distance (at least in the tiny scale natural for these worms). And this occurred with no sign of the animals crawling to the lid—they seemed to have teleported upward.
Experiments done to confirm what is happening, with lids completely empty of worms, showed that the transport took place very quickly, on a time scale of a tenth of a second. The worms seemed to assume a special position, stretching the body upwards, but the movement towards the cap itself was passive, not involving a contraction (as we would see in a jumping worm, for example).
This led the Japanese researchers to suspect that an electric field might be involved in the process. “We know that pollinators, such as insects and hummingbirds, have an electrical charge, and it is believed that pollen is attracted by the magnetic field formed by the pollinator and the plant”, explained Sugi in an official statement about the study. “What wasn’t completely clear is whether electric fields are used during interactions between different land animals.”
Trying to directly test this possibility, they placed the C. elegans on top of a glass electrode and realized that the worms were capable of jumping to another electrode by applying an electrical voltage. It worked: the jumps began to happen, at a speed similar to that of a human being walking.
What was most interesting, however, was what happened when the team tried to simulate this type of jump in a natural situation, where the C. elegans would hitch a ride on another invertebrate. For this, they took a bumblebee (a type of bee), duly anesthetized, and rubbed pollen on it, so that it became electrically charged. It’s more or less what happens when you pass a plastic comb through your hair and attract little pieces of paper with it.
the electric jump
When the worms approached the bumblebee, they put themselves in a “takeoff” position and were attracted by the insect’s body, landing on it. “They can also form a column of worms, so that one C. elegans is attracted and takes all the others along with it”, says the Japanese researcher.
It’s easy to imagine that, in nature, this would help worms travel comparatively immense distances on the backs of flying insects. It is likely that the C. elegans are able to sense variations in the electric field around them and thus prepare for takeoff —something that is also present in several other species with “electrical sense”.
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