When food runs out, certain tiny roundworms , barely visible to the naked eye, crawl toward one another and build living, wriggling towers that move as one superorganism . For the first time, we’ve caught them doing that in nature on video.

Scientists spent months pointing their digital microscope at rotting apples and pears to finally catch a glimpse of these living towers formed by Caenorhabditis roundworms in an orchard that is just downhill from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior’s location in Konstanz, Germany. “It wasn’t that hard to find. It’s just the people didn’t have the interest or time or funding for this kind of research,” says biologist Daniela Perez, lead author of the study.

Perez and her team at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior then studied t

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