Watch thousands of worms ‘explosively’ untangle themselves from a knotted ball in milliseconds

Worms can entangle themselves right into a single, big knot, solely to rapidly unravel themselves from the tightly wound mess inside milliseconds. Now, math reveals how they do it.

Researchers studied California blackworms (Lumbriculus variegatus) — skinny worms that may develop to be 4 inches (10 centimeters) in size — within the lab, watching because the worms intertwined by the hundreds. Though it took the worms minutes to kind right into a ball-shaped blob akin to a snarled tangle of Christmas lights, they might untangle from the jumble within the blink of an eye fixed when threatened, in accordance with a examine revealed April 28 within the journal Science (opens in new tab).