Amazing stuff!
Can you believe there is "no role specialization among individuals in towers"! Old worms can do it too! 😊
"When food runs out and competition heats up, nematodes assemble into living towers. They writhe and twist towards the sky with the goal of latching on to a passing animal to hitch a ride to more comfortable digs.
Scientists had hypothesised this for decades, but no one had seen these aggregations form outside of the laboratory. Now, researchers in Germany have recorded the first video footage of nematodes “towering” in the real world in decaying apples and pears. ..."
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- First evidence of “living towers” in nature: observed in rotting apples and pears from local orchards in Konstanz, Germany
- Tower function confirmed: towers can attach to passing insects and can bridge physical gaps to disperse
- A powerful model: C. elegans are a new a tool for studying the ecology and evolution of collective dispersal
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From the highlights and abstract:
"Highlights
• We report the first direct evidence of nematode towers occurring in nature
• Towers can serve to bridge gaps and disperse multiple individuals via phoresy
• Worms from all life stages can tower
• There is no role specialization among individuals in towers
Summary
Dispersal behavior allows organisms to find new resources under harsh conditions; collective dispersal in group-living organisms raises interesting questions about kin selection, cooperation, and social conflicts that offer an exciting window into the evolution of sociality.
One type of collective dispersal is when individuals physically link their bodies into a super-organism and move as a group, but these phenomena are rare in nature and few empirical systems exist to enable their mechanistic dissection. Individuals of many nematode species can group together and self-assemble into a living tower of worms, which is hypothesized to be a collective dispersal structure. However, direct evidence demonstrating the occurrence and the function of towers in nature has been scarce.
We documented towering behavior under natural, semi-natural, and laboratory conditions to confirm its existence and then manipulated these towers to confirm that they can bridge gaps and respond to external stimuli to confer group dispersal by phoresy. Having established the ecological and functional relevance of nematode towers, we developed a laboratory towering assay with the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans to exploit its experimental capabilities. Our lab assay rapidly and robustly induces towering and reveals several fundamental characteristics of both the towers and the constituent individuals, which together demonstrate the high experimental potential of using our model and the ample future research avenues that it opens.
In summary, combining ecological relevance and empirical possibilities, our work sets the key foundations to establish nematode towering behavior as a powerful opportunity to elucidate the ecology, the mechanisms, and the evolution of collective dispersal."
Tower power (original news release) "Living worm towers are recorded in the wild for the first time, a rare example of collective hitchhiking in nature"
A tower of fluorescent labelled C.elegans, using a pointed bristle for support
Is this not a cute drawing? One of the researchers is possibly a great fan of Leonardo da Vinci or Albrecht Dürer! 😊 You don't see such drawings very often anymore in scientific works.
Graphical abstract
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