Bacteria the key to ice worm survival

EarthSky
This article is republished with permission from GlacierHub. This post was written by Manon Verchot.

Researchers develop new insights into ice worm and bacteria evolution by looking into ice worm digestive tracts.

Deep in their gut, Alaskan ice worms have an average of 10,000 individual bacteria, including one species that until recently had never been discovered, as researchers from the Department of Biological Sciences at the Tokyo Institute of Technology found.

Living in ice is no easy feat, but ice worms, relatives of the earth worm and members of the annelid phylum, make it work. The tiny worms burrow through many North American glaciers, surviving in temperatures that would kill most animals. Ice worms cannot be found anywhere else in the world and researchers suspect this is due to the fact that ice worms can only exist within crawling distance of glaciers. Still, some ice worms live on glaciers that were never connected by the Cordilleran ice sheet, posing an interesting conundrum for scientists.

While these one-inch worms can manage living conditions that don’t favor life, they don’t do well in temperatures above freezing. Just a few degrees above freezing is hot enough to kill the creatures, and it’s not a nice death; ice worms will literally melt when it gets too hot, their membranes breaking down. But luckily for them this doesn’t happen too often since they can safely burrow into the depths of glaciers, where temperatures remain fairly constant. They feed on algae that grows on glaciers as well as other forms of organic matter.

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