It might appear like a snake, but don’t fret, it’s just a mass procession of”snakeworms.” (Is that much better?) A minimum of, that’s what Derek Sikes, a teacher of entomology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, calls them.
These snakeworms are really a kind of dusky-winged fungi gnat larvae. They migrate en masse, climbing up over each other and forming a snake-like tube. Somebody identified one of these snakeworm migrations today in Fairbanks, Alaska.
According to Alaska Public Media, the first report of these “unusual lines of moving gnat larvae” in Fairbanks remained in 2007. Sikes informed the news outlet that there have actually been “sporadic sightings” in the years ever since.
Sikes and other researchers published a paper about “snakeworm” fungi gnats at the end of in 2015. The authors presented that these gnats, which form larval masses that relocate snake-like columns, represented a new types— Sciara serpens.
In the paper, the authors cite reports from Pennsylvania in the 1860s of larval masses that look like a “thin grey snake.” Clearly, these gnats have been forming odd larval-snake processions for a while now, but nobody looked carefully enough to realize they were in fact an unrecognized species.
Find out more on Sikes’s university page here.
Header image thanks to Jenna Hamm through Alaska Public Media
It might appear like a snake, but don’t stress, it’s just a mass procession of “snakeworms,” which aren’t really worms. Let’s clear this up.