Ice Worms:
They're Real, and They're Hot
2/24/2006
The Seattle Times
By Sandi Doughton
Byline: Sandi Doughton
Ben Lee is stalking a creature most people think is a myth, if they've heard of it at all.
"I don't know what we'll see," he warned, loading an ice ax and
snow shovel into his backpack. "Nobody knows what ice worms do in
winter."
Lee, a senior at the University of Puget Sound, has come to Mount
Rainier to find out.
Thriving in conditions that would turn most living things to Popsicles,
these inch-long earthworm cousins inhabit glaciers and snowfields in the
coastal ranges of Alaska, British
Columbia, Washington and Oregon. They move
through seemingly solid ice with ease and are at their liveliest near the
freezing point of water. Warm them up slightly and they dissolve into goo.
Their life cycle remains a mystery.
But ice worms are beginning to yield their secrets to a few hardy scientists
who see broad applications from understanding one of the planet's oddest
inhabitants.
NASA anted up $200,000 last year to explore the worms' cold tolerance and
what it might say about the possibility of life on Jupiter's icy moons and
other planets. That work could also improve cold storage of organs and tissues
for transplantation.
As glaciers shrink in the face of global warming, interest is growing in ice
worms and other animals whose habitat could melt away within the next 50 years.
National Geographic funded one of the first field surveys to focus on ice-worm
ecosystems.
"They're kind of hot right now," Lee said as he and roommate Dave
Eiriksson strapped on their gear and headed up the slopes above Paradise.
The rare sunny day was perfect for "worming," as the 23-year-old
Lee calls it.
The men followed a snowshoe trail that wound steeply through stands of
subalpine fir half-buried in pillowy drifts. More than 600 inches of snow fall
here in an average year, and it's hard to imagine anything without fur could
survive.
"People don't believe me when I tell them I'm studying ice worms,"
said Lee, tall and lanky with curly hair and an infectious enthusiasm.
"The words just don't go together."
A cold-loving Minnesotan, Lee picked ice worms for his undergraduate biology
thesis because they're weird, haven't been studied much and provide an excuse
to get out in the mountains. He spent last summer gathering specimens from
glaciers across the Olympic range.
In warmer weather, the black worms are hard to miss. As the sun sets, they
swarm to the surface to feed on algae, pollen and other digestible debris.
"In some places, they're so thick you can't step without killing tons
of them," Lee said.
Before dawn, the worms retreat back into the ice. Their species name,
solifugus, means sun-avoiding.
In winter, when algae can't grow and snow blankets the surface, Lee suspects
the worms simply stay deep inside the ice, perhaps in a dormant state.
His plan is to root them out.
"That's where we're headed," he said after an hour's uphill
trudge, much of it following steps kicked into the snow by previous hikers. He
pointed to a bowl below McClure Rocks at an elevation of about 7,000 feet.
It's not a glacier, but the depression is filled with snow year-round and
worms are regularly spotted there in the summer.
Kicking up knee-deep powder, Lee plunged down the incline.
On the floor of the basin, he grabbed his snow shovel, held it out like a
divining rod and made beeping sounds as he tried to figure out where to dig.
"We're flying by the seat of our pants," he said cheerfully.
Ice worms were first described in 1887 on the Muir Glacier in Alaska. Famed Seattle photographer Asahel Curtis took pictures of worms
on Mount Olympus in 1907 and dubbed them
"snow eels."
But fiction, rather than fact, informed Yukon bard Robert Service, who made several
references to ice worms in his poems and novels. He was probably inspired by
journalist Elmer "Stroller" White, who, during the Klondike Gold Rush
of the 1890s published tall tales in the Dawson City, Yukon, newspaper,
describing 4-foot-long wigglers that came out of their lairs and chirped like
birds when the mercury dropped below minus 74 Fahrenheit.
In "The Ballad of the Ice Worm Cocktail," published in 1940,
Service took up the theme and recounted the comeuppance of a boastful British
nimrod who gagged when challenged to down a drink containing a "bilious
blue" worm. It was really a piece of painted spaghetti, the poem reveals
at the end. Bars in Alaska
used to re-create the stunt for their customers.
While Service's work survived, ice-worm studies languished for decades.
"A hundred years of research adds up to about this much paper,"
Lee said, holding his thumb and index finger less than an inch apart.
Searching the Internet, he connected with biologists Dan Shain and Paula
Hartzell, who between them probably account for the bulk of the world's
ice-worm expertise.
Shain's first exposure came during a 1995 fishing trip to Alaska, when he saw a cartoon worm on a cafe
placemat. He thought it was a joke until he saw the real thing on display at
the Portage Glacier visitor center outside Anchorage.
A professor at Rutgers University in Camden,
N.J., Shain has wrangled money
from National Geographic and NASA for his studies on ice-worm physiology.
Hartzell, who worked with Shain, has surveyed more than 80 glaciers and is
writing a book on the peculiar community of snow fleas, nematodes and spiders
that dwell on the ice. As the largest invertebrate, ice worms dominate this
frozen world.
"It sucks to dig," Eiriksson observed, panting. He was standing in
the bottom of a seven-foot pit, shoveling snow while Lee took a break and
gulped down a muffin.
In summer, Hartzell has found worms in blue ice more than six feet below the
surface. Lee peered into a crevasse in Olympic National Park and spotted a worm
10 feet down, poking its head out of a sheer ice face.
Hartzell has seen them with their tails anchored in ice and their heads
waving in meltwater streams.
She's convinced they travel through tiny fissures in the ice, but other
scientists have suggested the worms secrete a substance that melts a path, like
a warm knife through butter.
Polar bears weather the cold with thick insulation and the ability to
generate their own heat. Antarctic cod have blood laced with antifreeze. Ice
worms don't have any of these defenses.
Instead, they have the remarkable ability to boost their cells' energy
production when the temperature drops, Shain discovered. "It's equivalent
to putting more gasoline in your tank," he said.
The worms also possess cell membranes and enzymes that function and stay
flexible in temperatures where most animals' cellular processes creak to a
halt.
The downside is extreme sensitivity to heat. At about 40 degrees F, the
worms' membranes melt and their enzymes go haywire.
Shain's NASA project focuses on a key enzyme that regulates the worms'
energy cycle.
Organs harvested for transplant deteriorate as the cells' energy stores are
depleted, he explained. Unraveling the ice worms' metabolism may lead to drugs
or chemical solutions that could keep organs alive longer.
It's more of a longshot, but Shain thinks the worms might also hold clues to
suspended animation, or cryonics _ the freezing of people or organs. In his
laboratory refrigerator, worms have lived up to two years with no apparent
source of food.
Blue shadow engulfed the basin at Mount Rainier
where Lee and Eiriksson continued to toil in their wormless hole, now nearly 10
feet deep. A raven perched on a rock and cocked its head to survey the scene.
During warmer weather, when the worms are easier to find, Lee scooped up
hundreds from pools of glacial meltwater, packed them in a cooler with snow and
FedEx'd them to New Jersey
for Shain's enzyme studies.
For his own project, the UPS student is analyzing DNA from the Olympic
worms, to see how they're related to other populations.
Hartzell found northern worms are so different from their southern relatives
as to almost be separate species. She also found tiny, remnant populations
where receding glaciers have stranded colonies.
That doesn't bode well for ice worms' future.
Rising global temperatures are melting glaciers across the globe, and few
are vanishing faster than those along the coast of North America.
"When those glaciers are gone, the ice worms are going to be
gone," Hartzell said.
But not yet.
"I found one!" Lee shouted from the bottom of the now-12-foot
hole. "I think I see another one," he said, kneeling to paw through
the snow.
Using his ice ax for a step, he heaved himself to the surface.
"I can't believe it," he said, grinning. "The elusive ice
worm."
In each hand was a chunk of snow and what looked like a dark thread. The
shorter of the two worms corkscrewed slowly, then froze, literally.
When Lee touched the tiny spiral, it snapped.
Even ice worms have their limits. Inside the insulating snow, temperatures
remain near freezing. But the air temperature had dropped to about 20 degrees F
below the ice-worm survival point.
"Oh well," Lee said. "It's still pretty exciting."
Only two other researchers are known to have found wintering ice worms, both
in Alaska
late last year.
Now that scientists know they can unearth the worms in winter if they're
willing to dig deep enough, studies can begin to tease out the metabolic tricks
that allow the creatures to endure months of entombment under the snow.
For Lee, it's back to the lab, where he will continue sorting through his
DNA results.
He'll also devote time to another goal: memorizing Service's 140-line
ballad, with its fanciful description of ice worms on the Mountain of Blue Snow:
"Yet all is clear as you draw near for coyly peeking out
Are hosts and hosts of tiny worms, each indigo of snout
And as no nourishment they find, to keep themselves alive
They masticate each other's tails, till just the Tough survive."
ICE WORMS IN LITERATURE
Early 20th-century writer Robert Service mentioned ice worms in several
books and poems, including this passage in his novel "The Trail of
'98":
"In the land of the pale blue snow
Where it's ninety-nine below,
And the polar bears are dancing on the plain,
In the shadow of the pole
Oh, my Heart, my Life, my Soul,
I will meet thee when the ice-worms nest again."
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