![]() “That recurrent figure-eight motion suggested to us an unweaving mechanism that could operate to untangle from a knot,” Patil says. They watched Tuazon’s recordings of one worm in a petri dish of water and observed that in response to a perceived threat such as a pulse of ultraviolet light, the worm suddenly corkscrewed, looping to the left, then quickly to the right, again and again. The fact that the worms were able to solve that showed that there was something interesting going on with these tangles that we wanted to work out mathematically.”ĭunkel and Patil adapted their mathematical codes on knot stability to worm tangling by first studying the behavior of a single worm. “We know intuitively it’s really difficult to untangle fibers. “When he showed us those videos, especially of the worms untangling, we were hooked,” Patil says. Bhamla also sent the mathematicians a few videos taken in the lab of the tangling worms. “I saw this study and thought, my goodness, these mathematical principles could be suited to being applied to worms,” says Bhamla, who reached out to Dunkel and Patil to see whether they could shed mathematical insight on the worms’ knotting. In that work, the mathematicians devised a model that predicts a knot’s stability, based on the twists and crossings of various knotted segments. Wondering what the worms could be doing to get themselves out of such intricate configurations, Bhamla recalled a study by Dunkel and his group at MIT. When they sense a predator, the worms can untangle in milliseconds, dispersing in many directions. A ball of worms can also move as one, collectively crawling along the floor of a lake or pond. A large knot of worms can prevent interior worms from drying out in drought conditions. The group has previously found that in nature, the worms tangle up as a protective and defensive mechanism. Tuazon, a PhD student in the lab, was observing California blackworms swimming in a laboratory aquarium when they were struck by the worms’ remarkable tangling and untangling abilities. Saad Bhamla at Georgia Tech.īhamla’s group studies worms, insects, and other living organisms, and how their behavior can inspire the design of new devices and robotic systems. Patil’s co-authors on the study are Jörn Dunkel, professor of mathematics at MIT, and co-first author Harry Tuazon, along with Emily Kaufman, Tuhin Chakrabortty, David Qin, and M. ![]() “One could think of engineering active woven fibers that could rearrange when they are clogged or a smart robot that could change its grasp by tangling and untangling.” “We can take inspiration from these worms to think about how we might manipulate polymeric and filamentary systems,” says Vishal Patil, a postdoc at Stanford University, who developed a mathematical model of the worms’ behavior while a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Mathematics. Their findings, published today in Science, could inspire designs for fast, reversible and self-assembling materials and fibers. Through experiments and mathematical modeling, the team has now pinned down the mechanism by which the worms tangle up and quickly unwind. Perplexed by how the wigglers can disentangle such elaborate knots so quickly, MIT mathematicians teamed up with biophysicists at Georgia Tech to study the worms’ knotty behavior. In the face of a predator or other perceived threat, the worms can instantly untangle, disassembling the jiggly jumble in milliseconds. This is not so for a wily species of West Coast worm.įound in marshes, ponds, and other shallow waters, California blackworms ( Lumbriculus variegatus) twist and curl around each other by the thousands, forming tightly wound balls over several minutes. As anyone who has ever unwound a string of holiday lights or detangled a lock of snarled hair knows, undoing a knot of fibers takes a lot longer than tangling it up in the first place.
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