In my second-ever article I wrote about how spiders can use electric fields to fly. Now scientists have discovered that some worms also have this power, and their technique is much more dramatic.
Scientists from Japan were studying a type of worm called Caenorhabditis elegans (see-no-rab-die-tus ell-luh-gans), and kept finding them hanging from the lids of the petri dishes they were being grown in. At first they thought the worms, which are less than a millimetre long, got there by climbing the walls. However, when they set up cameras they saw the worms were simply leaping straight up.
The worms weren’t really jumping though – they were letting an electric field pull them upwards. The researchers then did a series of experiments to test how this works. One of these showed that the worms could possibly use this ability to catch a ride on passing insects, which are often electrically charged. This would allow them to travel to new territory much quicker than otherwise possible.
Lachlan Writes Science 