Word of a curious worm phenomenon has spread among scientists over the years. Words like, “they’re living in giant towers, Jim.” An understandably perplexing concept, but one that we can now confirm thanks to the first-ever recordings of the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans forming towers in nature.

Turns out, there’s a lot more to them than just a big pile of worms. The stacks of worms are actually coordinated and move like a superorganism in motion. Glued together in a great, wiggling plinth, the worms can sense and grow and respond to touch, sticking to anything that gets close enough.

Finding these nematode towers involved a lot of diving into rotten fruit out in an orchard. That was the task senior author Dr Serena Ding , group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Animal

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