Thousands of tiny nematode worms can join up to form tentacle-like towers that can straddle large gaps or hitch rides on larger animals
By Michael Le Page
5 June 2025
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What do you do when food is running low and you are a tiny, millimetre-long worm? The answer, it turns out, is join up with thousands of your fellows to make a tentacle-like superorganism that can bridge gaps to nearby objects or grab hold of larger animals to carry you further afield.
Biologists studying nematode worms in labs have long known that they occasionally form “towers”, but these haven’t been studied in detail, says Serena Ding at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany. So, she and her colleagues have done just that.
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The team found that worms such as the widely studied Caenorhabditis elegans are most likely to form towers when there are large numbers of them, a shortage of food and some kind of structure for them to congregate on – in these experiments, a toothbrush bristle.
The worms did sometimes form towers in the absence of any physical support, but these structures were no higher than 5 millimetres and lasted for just a minute. With a bristle as a foundation, the towers reached 11 mm high and lasted up to half a day.
In other kinds of nematodes, there are reports of towers up to 50 mm high. “They can grow super big,” says Ding.
