Despite our knack for tying knots in everything from shoelaces to laser beams, there is still a lot we humans can learn from a tiny tangle-inclined worm.
Commonly known as the California blackworm, the tiny invertebratehas graciously shared a few of its secrets in a new study examining the math behind its incredible living knots.
"We wanted to understand the exact mechanics behind how the worms change their movement dynamics to achieve tangling and ultrafast untangling,"co-author Saad Bhamla, assistant professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech. Individuals range in length from about 4 to 8 centimeters , but they can also intricately tangle themselves together, forming a living worm blob with up to 50,000 individuals.
"But to understand this complex and mesmerizing maneuver, I started conducting experiments with only a few worms."After seeing Tuazon's videos of the worms' rapid dispersal from a blob, bioengineer Vishal Patil and colleagues leapt at the chance to team up and study them. The researchers hoped to mathematically explain a worm blob, modeling how the worms tangle and disperse, but they would need more data. And recording precise imagery of a blob's structure proved difficult.."We tried all sorts of imaging techniques for months, including X-rays, confocal microscopy, and tomography, but none of them gave us the real-time resolution we needed."
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