50 Fun Facts About Worms

Which former US president's foundation has led the fight to wipe out Guinea worm disease since 1986?

Jimmy Carter said in 2015 that his last wish was to see the last Guinea worm die before he did. When his centre took up the fight in 1986, an estimated 3.5 million people a year were infected.

Which blood-feeding worms were classed as a medical device by US regulators in 2004?

Leeches earn their place in microsurgery because their saliva carries hirudin, which stops blood clotting. They relieve blood congestion in reattached fingers and rebuilt ears.

Ringworm, the itchy red ring that spreads across the skin, is caused by what kind of organism?

A fungus causes ringworm, and about 40 different kinds can do it. The same family of skin infections includes athlete's foot and jock itch.

The silkworm, raised in China for thousands of years for its silk, prefers the leaves of which tree?

Mulberry leaves, above all those of the white mulberry, are the silkworm's food. Millennia of selective breeding have left the adult moths dependent on humans to reproduce.

In Frank Herbert's Dune, the giant sandworms of Arrakis produce which priceless substance?

The spice, properly called melange, is made by sandworm larvae and makes safe interstellar travel possible. Harvesting it is deadly work, because the territorial worms attack the crews.

Which long pasta, similar to spaghetti, has an Italian name that literally means 'little worms'?

Vermicelli comes from vermicello, the Italian diminutive of the word for worm. English speakers use the name for a strand thinner than spaghetti, but in Italy it is the thicker of the two.

Heartworm, a parasite that lodges in the heart and lungs of dogs, is spread by which biting insects?

Mosquitoes carry heartworm larvae from one animal to the next with their bites. The adult worms can then live for five to seven years inside a dog.

In Old English legends such as Beowulf, 'wyrm', the ancestor of 'worm', named which creature?

A dragon was a 'worm' to the Anglo-Saxons, whose word wyrm covered any long legless beast. The Lambton Worm of County Durham legend keeps the old meaning alive.

The shipworm, which riddled wooden hulls with tunnels for centuries, is really what kind of animal?

A clam in all but looks, the shipworm rasps into timber with its two small shells. Watching one tunnel safely through wood gave Marc Brunel the idea for the tunnelling shield.

Which country's Waitomo Caves draw tourists to see ceilings lit by thousands of glowworms?

New Zealand's glowworms are not worms but the larvae of a small gnat found nowhere else. Each one hangs up to 30 silk threads dotted with sticky droplets to snare flying insects.

Which of Britain's ribbon worms can reach 30 metres, making it one of the longest animals on Earth?

The bootlace worm is only 5 to 10 millimetres wide for all that length. One washed ashore at St Andrews in 1864 was put at more than 55 metres, though it may have been stretched.

Which flatworms, favourites of school biology labs, can regrow a whole body from one tiny sliver?

Planarians can rebuild a complete animal from a piece as small as 1/279th of the original. The trick depends on neoblasts, adult stem cells scattered through the body.

Adult giant tube worms at deep-sea vents have no mouth or gut; what inside them supplies their food?

Bacteria packed into a spongy organ turn the vents' hydrogen sulfide into energy for the worm. The animals were first seen in 1977, on an expedition to the Galápagos Rift.

Trichinosis, caused by tiny worms coiled in muscle, classically comes from which undercooked meat?

Pork from infected pigs was the classic route for trichinosis. In North America, though, the meat most often to blame is now bear.

The Worm Moon, a North American name tied to the spring thaw, is the full moon of which month?

March brings the Worm Moon, long explained by earthworms surfacing as the soil warms. A 1760s account by Captain Jonathan Carver says it really meant larvae emerging from thawing tree bark.

On Sesame Street, an orange worm named Slimey is the beloved pet of which Muppet?

Oscar the Grouch keeps Slimey in a trash can far bigger inside than it looks, with room for a swimming pool and an ice rink. Grouch is not only his mood but the name of his species.

Mealworms, cleared as human food in the EU in 2021, are the young of which kind of insect?

A beetle, the yellow mealworm beetle, is what each mealworm grows into. Switzerland approved the larvae as food in 2017, four years earlier.

The slow worm, a shiny limbless animal of European gardens that can shed its tail, is really what?

A lizard without legs, the slow worm may be the longest-lived of its kind. One male lived at Copenhagen Zoo from 1892 until 1946.

Waxworms, caterpillars that usually raid beehives, can eat and digest which man-made material?

Plastic film made of polyethylene is turned by waxworms into ethylene glycol, which biodegrades quickly. Beekeepers know the same caterpillars as pests that chew through honeycomb.

Which parasite, dubbed the 'germ of laziness', did a 1909 Rockefeller drive target in the US South?

Hookworm larvae in contaminated soil get in through the skin, which is why walking barefoot is the main risk. John D. Rockefeller gave a million dollars to launch the campaign across 11 states.

Which worm, known for giving children a night-time itch, is the commonest worm infection in the US?

Pinworm reaches about one in five American children at some point. The itch strikes at night because that is when the female worms crawl out to lay their eggs.

Schistosomiasis flatworms, caught by wading in tropical lakes, first develop inside which animals?

Snails of certain freshwater kinds release the larvae, which is why the illness is also called snail fever. Among tropical parasitic diseases, only malaria does more economic harm.

Filarial worms that nest in the lymph vessels can cause which severe swelling of the limbs?

Elephantiasis develops in only some of those infected, since most cases show no symptoms at all. The worms do their damage by nesting in the lymphatic vessels and disrupting their work.

Which worm-killing drug, a weapon against river blindness, won its discoverers a 2015 Nobel Prize?

Ivermectin traces back to a microbe that Satoshi Ōmura found in soil near a Japanese golf course. William Campbell of Merck then showed that it cleared worms from infected mice.

Loa loa, an African worm spread by deer flies, is notorious for visibly crossing which body part?

The eye is where the adult worm sometimes surfaces, crossing the white for anything from a few hours to a week. That habit has earned it the common name African eye worm.

The lancet liver fluke drives which insects up grass blades at dusk, to be eaten by grazing sheep?

Ants infected by the fluke leave the colony as the evening cools, climb a grass blade and lock their jaws onto its tip until dawn. Farmers avoid grazing flocks early or late for that reason.

Horsehair worms growing inside crickets alter their hosts' behaviour so that the insects do what?

Jump into water is what the infected insect does, drowning itself so the adult worm can swim free. Mating worms then tangle into tight balls known as Gordian knots.

Which worms are so plentiful in soil and sea that they make up about 80% of all individual animals?

Nematodes, or roundworms, can number more than a million in a single square metre. Their name comes from the Greek for thread.

The tiny lab worm C. elegans famously survived the 2003 loss of which Space Shuttle?

Columbia broke up on re-entry, yet the worms carried as an experiment survived the fall. Their descendants later went back into space aboard Endeavour.

Osedax 'zombie worms', first found in Monterey Bay in 2002, feed by boring into what on the seabed?

Whale bones are dissolved with acid from the worms' root-like tissue to reach the fats inside. Each female is more than 20,000 times larger than the microscopic males that live in her tube.

Which sand-buried ambush hunter among the bristle worms is named after a notorious US court case?

The Bobbit worm hides its whole body in the seabed and strikes when its five antennae sense passing prey. Fossil burrows of its kind found near Taiwan date back 20 million years.

The Christmas tree worm, named for its twin spiral crowns, spends its adult life embedded in what?

Living coral grows over the worm's chalky tube and adds to its protection. The spiral crowns are used for both feeding and breathing, and a built-in plug seals the tube when the worm withdraws.

The Pompeii worm of deep-sea vents is famed for tolerating what better than almost any other animal?

Extreme heat is its speciality: the tail end can rest at 50 °C while the feathery head pokes out into far cooler surroundings. Its genus is named after Alvin, the submersible that explored the first vents.

Which oval seabed animal, covered in a dense mat of hair-like bristles, is in fact a marine worm?

The sea mouse may owe its name to looking like a bedraggled house mouse when washed ashore. It is an active hunter of crabs and of other worms, some more than three times its own length.

Velvet worms, long soft-bodied animals with many legs, catch other invertebrates by squirting what?

Jets of glue, an adhesive slime fired from openings beside the mouth, pin the victim in place. Velvet worms form the only animal phylum that lives wholly on land.

Most earthworms carry both male and female reproductive organs, a condition described by which term?

Hermaphroditic though they are, earthworms still pair up to breed. Two mating worms exchange sperm and fertilise each other's eggs.

Which science, named from the Greek for a parasitic worm, studies tapeworms, flukes and roundworms?

Helminthology takes its name from helmins, the Greek for a parasitic worm. The same root gives medicine the word anthelmintic, for any drug that expels worms from the body.

Which term names the tapeworm's small grasping head, armed with hooks, suckers or both?

Scolex is the name for that anchor, which fixes the worm to its host's gut wall. With no mouth or digestive tract of its own, a tapeworm simply soaks up nutrients through its body surface.

The lab worm C. elegans was the first animal to have the wiring between all 302 of its what mapped?

Neurons make up about a third of all the body cells in this millimetre-long worm. Research on the species has earned at least four Nobel prizes.

Which 1990 film pits Kevin Bacon against giant burrowing worms called Graboids in the Nevada desert?

Tremors was shot in Inyo County, California, with a desert set standing in for the town of Perfection, Nevada. It gave Reba McEntire her acting debut and launched a long-running franchise.

Which studio developed Worms, the 1995 artillery game that Andy Davidson pitched at a trade show?

Team17 signed the game on the spot when co-founder Martyn Brown saw it at the 1994 ECTS show. Davidson had already pitched it to several other publishers without success.

Who released the 1988 internet worm that brought the first felony conviction under US hacking law?

Robert Morris launched it from MIT's network so that it would not be traced to Cornell, where he was a graduate student. A friend said he wrote it simply to see if it could be done.

The Diet of Worms, an imperial assembly in a German city in 1521, asked which reformer to recant?

Martin Luther stood firm, and the emperor's Edict of Worms then branded him a notorious heretic. The diet was an assembly and Worms a German city, so nothing unusual was eaten.

Which German sweet brand invented the gummy worm in 1981, giving the gummy bear a wriggly rival?

Trolli grew out of a firm that Willy Mederer founded in 1948. It first sold its sweets under the name Wilmed, a blend of his own two names.

Which naturalist's last scientific book, published in 1881, was devoted to the humble earthworm?

Charles Darwin called it a small book of little moment, yet it sold thousands of copies in its first few weeks. It came out shortly before his death.

The word 'bookworm' was first used not for a paper-eating insect but for which kind of person?

An avid reader was the original bookworm, back in the 16th century, and the insects only picked up the name later. No true worm eats books: the damage comes from insect larvae and tiny booklice.

Which caterpillars, the young of geometer moths, move by arching the body into a loop at every step?

Inchworms belong to the Geometridae, a family whose name means 'earth-measurers'. They grip with the front legs, draw the rear up into a loop, then reach forward again, as if pacing out the ground.

The Mongolian death worm's local name, olgoi-khorkhoi, likens the fabled beast to which body part?

An intestine is what the creature is said to resemble: the name means 'large intestine worm'. The West first heard of it through a 1926 book by the explorer Roy Chapman Andrews.

How to Eat Fried Worms, a 1973 children's novel about a gross bet, is by the son of which painter?

Norman Rockwell's son Thomas wrote the story, in which Billy must eat 15 worms in 15 days to win 50 dollars. He wins the bet and ends up hooked on worms.

Which NBA star, who played for the Detroit Pistons and Chicago Bulls, was nicknamed 'the Worm'?

Dennis Rodman got the nickname from his mother, for the way he wiggled while playing pinball. He carried it through spells with five NBA teams.