Watch Worms Build ‘Living Towers’ With Their Bodies to Survive in the Wild

Scientists have finally caught worms in the wild doing something they’d only ever seen in the lab: stacking themselves into swaying towers to hitch rides to find a better home and food.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, led by Serena Ding and Daniela Perez, publishing their work in Cell, placed digital microscopes over decaying apples and pears near Germany’s University of Konstanz and watched as Caenorhabditis nematodes worked together to make a break for it.

Specifically, they documented the worms in their “dauer” phase, wherein a worm enters a state of stasis that enables it to survive harsher conditions than usual.

Worms Filmed Building ‘Living Towers’ With Their Bodies in World First

In these rough conditions, the worms stack their bodies vertically, stretching up and up to increase their chances of catching a ride on a passing fly. The ones at the top of the tower are capable of latching onto airborne insects.

It’s like in an action movie when the hero makes a daring leap to grab onto a helicopter’s landing gear. Here’s a video of the worm stack in action. It’s kind of gross but fascinating:

Perez describes them as “a superorganism in motion,” meaning there’s a level of biological coordination here you don’t often see in nature, let alone in worms.

While we’re used to thinking of nematodes as solitary squirmy creatures, but this behavior suggests a surprising degree of cooperation, and maybe even a division of labor between the worms on the bottom of the pile and the action heroes at the top.

The discovery opens the door to a whole world of potential studies on how and why animals move and work together, according to the study’s senior author Ding. Now that you know all this, every time you see a rotting apple or pear in the trash, you’ll always imagine a tower of tiny worms just beneath it reaching up for their prize.