Bhatia likens it to walking on a moving sidewalk at the airport, but with the major advantage that it can go anywhere it pleases.
And if it’s a three-layer mass, the group can move nearly twice as fast as an individual can. In 2013, Aatish Bhatia reported in Wired that this strategy, which is also employed by other caterpillar species, helps the entire mass move 1.5 times faster than an individual can move, if it’s a two-layer mass. Diptera is the taxonomic order to which flies belong to, and the fungus gnat is a type of fly.īut why do they move like a snake from hell? It turns out this mass movement, in which the larvae crawl over each other like a conveyor belt, is a process the species uses to maximize the entire swarm’s speed. So Stevenson’s initial guess, that the larvae were some kind of Diptera, might be correct. replied to the video, identifying the phenomenon as dark-winged fungus gnat larvae, which are known to move in this kind of snake-like mass. Take a look:Ī fellow neuroscientist named Heather Read, Ph.D. It turns out this flowing mass of semi-transparent creatures is not demonic in origin (probably), and as Stevenson suspected, the larva mass’s hypnotic motion illustrates a highly efficient collective strategy for locomotion. He asked his followers for their help figuring out what was going on: “Anyone on science twitter know what this thing on my walkway is? Diptera larvae migration/earthworm biomimicry? Deleted scene from Akira?” I completely understand some of the squeamish reactions the video got, though.” “After that I was just curious - emergent behavior like flocking and swarming is super fascinating. “I have a serious fear of snakes so the first video was to get a closeup and confirm that they were insects,” Stevenson tells Inverse. Stevenson, an assistant professor of neuroscience at the University of Connecticut, tweeted a video of what he saw, which appears to be a slithering mass of worms moving as one. Looking at the nightmarish scene, the famous line from Dawn of the Dead might come to mind: “When there’s no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the Earth.” He probably didn’t expect to see what he actually saw: A rope of wriggling worms snaking along his walkway.
When Ian Stevenson returned home from a walk on Sunday morning, he thought he saw an earthworm with debris stuck to it.
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