Hotaling, Wimberger and a grad student - Jordan Boersma - have worked together to set up wildlife cameras around Paradise Glacier this summer. The natural history of ice worms and their predators, only now coming to light, underscores that the fragile environment of retreating glaciers is potentially far more complicated than first thought. "Early in the summer you tend to see more smaller ice worms, suggesting that at some point before that, their little eggs hatched and baby ice worms popped out," Wimberger says, "but we don't know." That's because ice worm reproduction is also a big black box. "I've kept them in my fridge, in my home, for physiology experiments, for a year or more, without adding anything to their system, and they're fine," Hotaling says.Īctually, though, he notes that he's not sure if those particular worms survived the year, or if they reproduced themselves. The worms are thought to eat snow algae and bacteria, but they may not need much. Winter may be the best season for them and a time when they can increase their energy stores, Hotaling says, because the worms are fatter when they first come out, early in the summer, than they are later on. Hotaling thinks that at times they likely live under 30 feet or more of snow, down where the yearly seasonal snow meets the older snow of the glacier. No one knows how these worms survive the harsh winters, or how far they burrow down into the snow. They thrive in a glacier but die if they freeze The worms shrug off shockingly high levels of harsh ultraviolet light, according to Hotaling, which is a good thing, because the summer sun on the treeless, snow-covered mountainside can be intense. He admits that it bothers "probably no one else that comes here." Many people who hike, ski or work on these mountains have never seen an ice worm despite their abundance, partly because the beasts only come to the surface at certain times of the year, at certain times of day. And it is a source of frustration for me." The National Park Service's visitors center near Paradise Glacier, for example, has a nice display on alpine wildlife, Hotaling says, "and there is somehow nothing about ice worms. "If you were going to put a biological mascot on glaciers of the Northwest," Hotaling says, "it's an ice worm."Īnd yet, with the possible exception of the annual Cordova Iceworm Festival in Alaska, these bizarre worms have generally been either ignored or treated as a mere curiosity.
Ice worms, however, show that this fragile environment - where the glaciers are vulnerable to climate change and are retreating - is potentially far more complicated. Scott Hotaling, glacier biologist, Washington State Universityįor a long time, he says, biologists have written off high-altitude glaciers such as these as basically sterile, lifeless places. There are more mysteries than there are solved things with ice worms.
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