Featured activities
Ice worms on the glacier
Scientist probes the mysteries of tiny critters in very cold water
By Doug O'Harra / Anchorage Daily News
ON THE LEARNARD GLACIER -- Dusk was falling in a bowl above the entrance to the car-and-train tunnel at Whittier, and the ice worms were rising.
As they do each evening, the creatures had emerged all over, appearing underfoot, scattering across the glacier surface like countless tiny threads. Many seemed to spread from cracks and crevasses, where the one-fiftieth-inch diameter animals evidently hid out during the day.
One deep pool was crawling with hundreds of them, forming a mural of dark runes. Some waved their three-fourth-inch-long bodies erratically in the frigid swirl, as though the glacier itself had sprouted sparse hair.
Rutgers biologist Dan Shain, leading a hike with two of his students and several journalists, stooped by the water and videotaped the wormy scene.
''This just blows me away, even after looking at worms the whole summer,'' he said. ''This is an ice worm swimming hole. This is amazing.''
An assistant professor who specializes in the development and biology of leeches and worms at Rutgers University in Camden, N.J., Shain spent the past two months stalking one of Alaska's most unlikely creatures: Mesenchytraeus solifugus, the ''sun-avoiding'' worm.
Subsisting on a diet of algae and using tiny bristles called setae to maneuver, the worms live out their entire lives at a temperature where human flesh freezes and most life stops. They're so strange that many people dismiss them as a hoax. But they exist all right, occupying an unknown number of glaciers and ice fields along the Northwest Coast, between Washington and Southcentral Alaska.
With funding from the National Geographic Society and personal savings, Shain came to Alaska in June on a low-budget expedition with the goal of breaking the ice shrouding the mysterious animal. He found that ice worms are far more common than previously thought, thriving on ice fields in the Whittier-Portage area and a half dozen other glaciers around the state.
Byron Valley, destination of tourist-oriented ''ice worm safaris'' from the Begich, Boggs Visitor Center, proved especially thick with worms.
''There are seven or eight colonies, each with millions of worms,'' Shain said. ''Each colony covers several acres. It's remarkable to see.''
''They're everywhere,'' added Angie Farrell, a graduate student who arrived in August with another student, Tarin Mason. ''You can't put your foot down without stepping on them.''
With a Ph.D. from Colorado State University, the 35-year-old Shain is a matter-of-fact scientist with a dry sense of humor, day-old stubble and a persistent streak. He believes he's stumbled onto that rare scientific treasure -- a barely known species. Since they were first described in the late 1800s, ice worms have been studied in any detail only once before, during a field expedition to Glacier Bay National Park in the 1960s. Scientific literature rarely mentions them at all.
|
