This is scientific American's 60 second science.

I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

In the science fiction story Dune, the desert planet Arrakis is inhabited by enormous fearsome sandworms.

They blast out of the dunes to swallow vehicles whole.

They also look sort of familiar to Caltech geneticist Paul Sternberg.

They look like nematodes.

You know, anything in the popular culture that has relation to the worms, we follow.

Nematodes, of course, are much smaller than sandworms.

Most nematodes you can just barely see.

And they're a lot slower.

These worms would probably take a hundred years to get across the US

if they could do it and they went continuously day and night.

Even so, they're pretty scary when you look at him up close.

Sternberg and his colleagues had a hunch they might find nematodes lurking in one of California's most extreme habitats,

Mono Lake, on the east side of the Sierra Nevada.

It's super salty, alkaline, and loaded with

arsenic, and previously known to harbor only two animal species, brine shrimp and

alkali flies. So the researchers took soil samples at beaches around the lake and indeed they found

eight species of nematodes living there.

So we just went from two animals to at least ten species.

So that's what's kind of striking. So are they going to be others in the

lake? Yeah. People should go look. Photos and details are in the journal Current Biology.

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