Behold, the Worm Blob and Its Computerized Twin - The New York Times

In the wild, a worm blob looks like any other mud ball lolling around the bottom of a pond.

When times are good, a worm is simply a worm, wiggling about on its own.

When times are bad, a worm must become a blob, entangling with hundreds or thousands of other worms into a slimy, writhing ball.

And, like an animated ball of yarn, the worm blob can move as one unit, meandering away from predators or stress.

A worm blob behaves as a solid and a fluid, like a ball of dough or a glob of shampoo.

It only takes around 10 worms to form a coherent blob.

There is no known limit to how many worms can form a blob, except, perhaps, your imagination.

When Serena Ding, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, first saw a photo of blackworm blobs, her mind raced.

elegans blobs as “strongly overlapping, like a bowl of spaghetti noodles.” Blackworm blobs “are more like spaghetti noodles dropped on the floor,” she said, frowning, in a Zoom call.

To him, the blobs feel like pizza dough flowing through fingers.

Ozkan-Aydin also found that the worm blobs moved collectively away from stressors like light and heat.

But if the plate is heated to around 100 degrees Fahrenheit, too hot for the worms to survive, the blob rapidly disentangles.

In smaller numbers, the blob propels itself by dividing the labor, with outstretched, pulling worms up front and coiled, wiggling worms in the back reducing friction.

Peleg of biological polymers she once worked with, like DNA, except the blobs were visible to the naked eye and made of worms.

Nguyen designed a simulated model of both individual and blobbed blackworms, involving small blobs of 20 identical worms.

Each worm was represented by a series of strung beads, able to bend and stretch like a real worm.

Nguyen fiddled with the stickiness of the worms and the strength of their individual propulsion until she found a sweet spot where the worm blob could finally move as one.

Garnier suggested that this expansion could answer one of his burning questions about the blob: where inside the blob a worm would most want to be.