First evidence of ‘living towers’ made of worms discovered in nature

By Kameryn Griesser, CNN

(CNN) — Nature seems to offer an escape from the hustle and bustle of city life, but the world at your feet may tell another story. Even in the shade of a fruit tree, you could be surrounded by tiny skyscrapers — not made of steel or concrete, but of microscopic worms wriggling and writhing into the shape of long, vertical towers.

Even though these miniature architects, called nematodes, are found all over Earth’s surface, scientists in Germany recently witnessed their impressive building techniques in nature for the first time.

After months of closely inspecting rotten pears and apples in local orchards, researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and the University of Konstanz were able to spot hundreds of the 1-millimeter-long (0.04-inch) wor