I THOUGHT IT WAS A FOOT-LONG STRAND of twine, except that it was moving, arching upward from the doormat again and again. What in the world? On that damp December day, I met my first nematomorph (above)—an ancient sister group to the nematodes capable of turning crickets into zombies that probably has some role in the bigger picture of insect control. I learned all that after a Google search for “thin worm” led me to the work of Ben Hanelt of the University of New Mexico, and the parasitic “horsehair worms” he’s wondered about since high school, and devotes his distinguished career to the study of. Ready for a stranger-than-truth tale of science fact and fiction? (And don’t panic—they have no interest in you or your pets.)Hanelt’s the guy who gets calls not just from curious types like me, but like clockwork from Oklahoma at the time of the first spring rain every year, when people find him to ask why their driveways are suddenly covered in the creatures, which can be a meters long (in some species) but are skinny like angel-hair pasta.
“Something odd has to happen for hairworms to be on soil or vegetation, instead of in water, so at first when I got those calls I thought: It must be earthworms,” says Hanelt, a Research Assistant Professor with the Center for Evolutionary and Theoretical Immunology in the Department of Biology at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. “But I asked one caller to send me some—and lo and behold, they were hairworms.”
It took years between the time Hanelt saw his first nematomorph, while on a survival-training hike in high school, until he actually knew what it was.
“There they were out in the middle of the forest in winter, in a bucket of water,” he recalls. He saved the strange animal,
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