Behold! The Mysterious Ice Worm

Short Wave

NPR

Daily News, Nature, Life Sciences, Astronomy, Science, News

4.7 • 6K Ratings

🗓️ 12 January 2023

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Inside the mountaintop glaciers of the Pacific Northwest lives a mysterious, and often, overlooked creature. They're small, black, thread-like worms that wiggle through snow and ice. That's right, ice worms! Little is known about them. But one thing scientists are sure of? They can't really handle freezing temperatures. In this episode, NPR science correspondent Nell Greenfieldboyce talks to Emily about how ice worms survive in an extreme environment and why scientists don't understand some of the most basic facts about them.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
0:05.0	Hey everybody, Emily Kwankeer with a rerun episode featuring now Greenfield Boys
0:11.9	NPR Science correspondent on some of the coolest worms on planet Earth.
0:17.0	Hey Emily, so you used to live in Alaska, right?
0:21.0	I did, I just got back from a little vacation there.
0:25.0	I did a lot of swimming, a lot of hiking, a lot of staring at glaciers from the airplane.
0:29.9	They are beautiful.
0:30.9	They're pretty.
0:31.9	Did you see any ice worms?
0:33.7	I did not see any ice worms.
0:36.5	Also, I only know a little bit of what ice worms are, but not really.
0:42.2	Yeah, I didn't know about them either, but I just got a crash course.
0:46.2	I met with a few researchers, including Peter Wimberger.
0:49.4	He's a biologist at the University of Puget Sound, and he told me he, like a lot of people,
0:55.6	used to think that ice worms were fictional, like a joke that people might play.
1:00.8	And so a while back, when one of his students said that he wanted to study ice worms, Wimberger
1:05.9	thought it was a prank.
1:07.7	And he realized they didn't believe him, and all of a sudden he pulled out this little
1:11.4	small stack of papers and he said, damn it, they're real.
1:14.6	I love this reaction.
1:16.2	So now, breaking news, ice worms are real.
1:18.9	What do they even look like?
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from NPR, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of NPR and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.