The Mysterious Ice Worm

Short Wave

NPR

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

4.7 • 6.5K Ratings

🗓️ 12 July 2021

⏱️ 14 minutes

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Summary

On the mountaintop glaciers of the Pacific Northwest lives a mysterious, and often, overlooked creature. They're small, thread-like worms that wiggle through snow and ice. That's right, ice worms! NPR science correspondent Nell Greenfieldboyce talks to Emily about how they survive in an extreme environment and why scientists don't understand some of the most basic facts about them.

For more of Nell's reporting, you can follow her on Twitter @nell_sci_NPR. You can follow Emily @emilykwong1234.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
0:04.3	Hey everybody, Emily Kwong here with Nell Greenfield,
0:08.0	voice NPR science correspondent, Howdy Nell.
0:10.7	Hey Emily, so you used to live in Alaska right?
0:14.2	I did, I just got back from a little vacation there.
0:18.2	I did a lot of swimming, a lot of hiking,
0:20.6	a lot of staring at glaciers from the airplane.
0:23.6	They are beautiful. They're pretty.
0:25.3	Did you see any ice worms?
0:26.9	I did not see any ice worms.
0:29.9	Also, I only know a little bit of what ice worms are,
0:34.4	but not really.
0:35.6	Yeah, I didn't know about them either,
0:37.4	but I just got a crash course.
0:39.6	I met with a few researchers, including Peter Wimberger.
0:42.8	He's a biologist at the University of Puget Sound.
0:45.4	And he told me he, like a lot of people,
0:48.8	used to think that ice worms were fictional,
0:51.5	like a joke that people might play.
0:54.0	And so a while back, when one of his students said
0:56.8	that he wanted to study ice worms,
0:58.9	Wimberger thought it was a prank.
	...

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