In a world of extremes, the small survive.
LIVING UP TO THEIR NAME
Ice worms, very small worms that live on glaciers on the western slopes of the Canadian Rocky Mountains, live up to their name in more ways than one. First, of course is their habitat of choice: ice. They thrive in the ice, using pollen and algae they find there as food. But like ice, they actually melt and die when the temperatures reach about 40 degrees Fahrenheit (No they don’t say “What a world, what a world,” but they’re probably thinking it.)
Fortunately for ice worms, they live in places where they can burrow deep into glaciers to stay cold when the sun is out, and they resurface to eat when the sun goes down, keeping them from the melting point.
COLORFUL AS WELL AS PLENTIFUL
Most ice worms appear dark brown or black in color, but some people have seen them in other colors as well, like red, blue, or white. These colors make them look like very tiny (they’re only about 2 centimeters or about three-quarters of an inch long) pieces of thread on the ice. As long as they’re able to stay cold, they can live up to ten years, which may be why they can multiply profusely. In fact, they outnumber humans by an astounding amount. According to scientists performing work for the North Cascades Glacier Climate Project (NCGCP) on the Suiattle Glacier of Glacier Peak, there was an estimated mean density of ice worms on the glacier at 2600 ice worms per square meter. Since the overall glacial area of the peak is 2.7 square kilometers, that means there were over 7 billion ice worms on Suiattle Glacier, more than Earth’s entire human population.
THEY MAY BE SMALL, BUT THEY’RE STILL INSPIRING
The English poet, Robert William Service, discovered the ice worms while he was living in Canada and wrote a couple of poems mentioning them. He is credited for making them famous, but they gained more widespread exposure when the writers of the TV show The X-Files created an episode of the series that included them. In it, their own version of parasitic ice worms burrowed deep inside a human host’s brain and made that person want to kill.
Dr. Humphrey Osmond coined the word “psychedelic” He administered LSD in experiments at the Weyburn Mental Hospital in the late 1950s.