A conga line of 80 worms was caught jumping on a bee’s bum using an electric field

Ever wished you could just leap onto the nearest travelling object to cut down your journey time? Well, scientists have just discovered that a microscopic worm can use electric fields to leap onto moving creatures – and they caught it on film.

Much like hitchhiking for humans, this ability allows the worms to save energy and travel further.

“When you are very small, the world is a very different place,” entomologist and broadcaster Adam Hart, who was not involved in the study, told BBC Science Focus.“Caenorhabditiselegansis an incredibly well-studied creature and yet even with all that attention we can still find something new.”

The 1mm long C. elegans worms, which are commonly found in the soil, were found attempting to fling themselves from Petri dishes in the labs of Hiroshima University and Hokkaido University, Japan. So the scientists rubbed pollen on a bumblebee to build an electric charge and watched as the worms jumped aboard.

Published in the journalCurrent Biology, the study also found that worms can get on each others’ ‘shoulders’ in a single column, each worm lifting the one below. In this tiny conga line, as many as 80 worms can jump the electric field in one go. A conga line of 80 worms were caught jumping on a bee’s bum using an electrical field, as shown in this video.

The scientists discovered that the worms jump at an average speed of 0.86 meters per second, which is about the same as human walking speed. However, this speed increases with electric field intensity.

Pollinators like butterflies, bees and hummingbirds are known to form an electric field with the plants that they pollinate to attract the pollen to them, making them electrically charged. But, until now, scientists have not known whether these fields are used between animals – let along as a way for tiny creatures to hop onto much larger ones.

“That we discovered this by researchers observingC. elegansstuck to the lids of Petri dishes shows just how important the first step of the scientific method, observation, really is,” said Hart.

The scientists are yet to discover exactly how the worms use the electric field, but they suspect it is genetic.

Hart added: “This discovery is likely to open up a whole range of studies looking at the use of electrical fields for movement of tiny creatures, especially those that need to jump on to a host, either for hitchhiking (termed phoresies) or because they are parasites.”