Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Bone-Eating Worms Found In Antarctic Waters

Posted by samzenpus on from the stays-crunchy dept.

sciencehabit writes "When you drop a whale backbone into Antarctic waters and retrieve it a year later, you'll find it covered with a pelt of wriggling, rosy-hued worms. Drop a chunk of wood in the same spot, and you'll discover that it's hardly changed. That's the result of a simple experiment to find out if some of the world's weirdest worms also live in Antarctic waters. The discovery extends the range of bone-eating worms to the Southern Ocean and suggests that Antarctic shipwrecks may be remarkably intact."

3 of 38 comments (clear)

  1. Aha! by Cryacin · · Score: 5, Funny

    When you drop a whale backbone into Antarctic waters and retrieve it a year later, you'll find it covered with a pelt of wriggling, rosy-hued worms

    So *this* is the "scientific research" that the Japanese are performing.

    --
    Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
  2. Re:Wouldn't it of been easier ... by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Funny

    Maybe the wood worms just spread out and find new wood to eat on an annual cycle, or are just really slow to find new wood.

    Where would this wood come from? The tropical rainforests of Antarctica?

  3. These worms.. by StarfishOne · · Score: 4, Funny

    .. are said to be b-b-b-b-bad to the bone. ;-)