High up on Mount Rainier in Washington, there’s a stunning view of the other white-capped peaks in the Cascade Range. But Scott Hotaling is looking down toward his feet, studying the snow-covered ground.
“It’s happening,” he says, gesturing across the Paradise Glacier.
Small black flecks suddenly appear on the previously blank expanse of white. The glacier’s surface quickly transforms as more and more tiny black creatures emerge. The ice worms have returned, snaking in between ice crystals and shimmering in the sun.
These thread-like worms, each only about an inch long, wiggle up en masse in the summertime, late in the afternoon, to do — what? Scientists don’t know. It’s just one of many mysteries about these worms, which have barely been studied even though they’re the most abundant critter living up there in the snow and ice.
“There are so many,” says Hotaling, a researcher at Washington State University. An estimated 5 billion ice worms can live in a single glacier.
“From where we’re standing right now, I can see, five, six, 10 glaciers,” he says. “And if every one hosts that density of ice worms? That is just a massive amount of biomass in a place that is generally biomass-poor.”
There are more mysteries than there are solved things, with ice worms.
Scott Hotaling, glacier biologist, Washington State University
For a long time, he says, high-altitude glaciers like these have been written off by biologists as basically sterile, lifeless places. Ice worms, however, show that this fragile environment — where the glaciers are vulnerable to climate change and are retreating — is potentially far more complicated.
“If you were going to put a biological mascot on glaciers of the northwest,” says Hotaling. “It’s an ice worm.”
And yet, with the possible exception of the annual Cordova Ice Worm Festival in Alaska, these bizarre worms have generally been either ignored or treated as a mere curiosity.
The National Park Service’s visitor’s center near Paradise Glacier, for example, has a nice display on alpine wildlife, says Hotaling, “and there is somehow nothing about ice worms. And it is a source of frustration for me.”
He admits that it bothers “probably no one else that comes here.” Many people who hike, ski, or work on these mountains have never seen an ice worm, despite their abundance, partly because the beasts only come to the surface at certain times of the year, at certain times of day.
‘Damn it, they’re real!’
“They’re very obvious once you notice them, but it’s so beyond your expectation, when you’re in a glacier environment, that there will be worms,” says Hotaling.
His colleague Peter Wimberger, of the University of Puget Sound, says that he got interested in the worms years ago, when a student said he wanted to study them. Wimberger thought the guy was pulling his leg and that it was some kind of prank. “He realized I didn’t believe him,” says Wimberger, “and all of a sudden he pulled out this little, small stack of papers and he said, ‘Damn it, they’re real!'”
The stack of scientific papers was small because only a half dozen or so researchers have ever studied the worms, says Hotaling.
No one knows how these worms survive the harsh winters, or how far they burrow down into the snow. Hotaling thinks that at times they likely live under 30 feet or more of snow, down where the yearly seasonal snow meets the older snow of the glacier.
Winter may be the best season for them and a time when they can increase their energy stores, says Hotaling, because the worms are fatter when they first come out, early in the summer, than they are later on.
The worms are thought to eat snow algae and bacteria, but they may not need much. “I’ve kept them in my fridge, in my home, for physiology experiments, for a year or more, without adding anything to their system, and they’re fine,” says Hotaling.
Actually, though, he notes that he’s not sure if those particular worms survived the year, or if they reproduced themselves. That’s because ice worm reproduction is also a big black box.
“Early in the summer you tend to see more smaller ice worms, suggesting that at some point before that, their little eggs hatched and baby ice worms popped out,” says Wimberger, “but we don’t know.”
What is clear, from lab tests, is something pretty surprising for an animal that has “ice” in its name: “They can’t handle even the slightest bit of freezing,” says Hotaling.
The worms may live at zero degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit), but if temperatures dip even slightly below that, he says, the worms die.
UV light doesn’t faze them
Other tests, meanwhile, show that the worms shrug off shockingly high levels of harsh ultraviolet light, according to Hotaling. Which is a good thing for them, because the summer sun on the treeless, snow-covered mountainside can be intense. Whatever drives them up to the surface, they seem to wait until the later hours in the day, when the sun isn’t as unforgiving.
“I actually think they are coming looking for the sun a bit,” says Hotaling, “because they want to have some of that heat energy to drive their biochemical reactions.”
