I exploited the infinite worm glitch by Leanne F. '30
experiencing motherhood for (thankfully) the first time
I hate rainy days. Not because of the wet socks or gloomy skies, but because of the horrid little creatures that are summoned by the rain. The mere sight of a snail crossing my path or a wiggling worm on the pavement makes me involuntarily shriek in terror. This means that on the few rainy days we have back home in San Diego, I am almost always late for school (I have to creep along the sidewalk and keep a 10-ft radius around any slugs or worm-like things I see on the floor).
You can imagine my horror when I realized that basically the only wound model for my research that I could realistically use at home was planarian worms. Not just a few, but hundreds of them, each of which I would have to raise, decapitate, and watch regenerate under a scope for weeks.
But I love my research. So, I was determined to become the best worm mother out there.
Pre-op stats
If it weren’t for my fear, these worms are actually super cool. They’re called planarians, and are these small freshwater flatworms. Scientists discovered that If you chop one planarian into 10 pieces, they’ll grow into 10 new planarians. It’s actually how they reproduce! They spit themselves in half, then the booty grows a head and the head grows a booty and kachow you got two worms.
A planarian regrowing its head after I decapitated it
The smallest planarian chunk to grow into a full planarian was 1/279th of the worm. So if you keep chopping and growing and chopping growing, congrats! You’ve unlocked the infinite planarian glitch.
These crazy regenerative abilities come from the huge amount of neoblasts, or pluripotent adult stem cells, so they’re often used to study regeneration, stem cells, and aging.
Okay! Enough info. Let’s embark on my journey to worm motherhood.
Acquiring the planarians
I was going to go planarian hunting in a few nearby streams, but thankfully the everything-industrial-complex that is Amazon carries packs of 30 planarians. $150.97 and 300 planarians later, I was ready to roll.
Setup:
- Big tupperware of worms
- Amazon video microscope connected to computer
- Amazon surgical knives
- Modified pipettes
- Lots of bottled water
Chop time! [Decapitation warning]
In a non-sadistic way, I had a lot of fun experimentally finding the best way to slice the worm. They’re speedy and hard to accurately cut, so I tried ice water to slow them down (useless), darkness to keep them from running from the microscope light (I couldn’t see), and trapping it in a water drop.
I settled on trapping it in a droplet and taking aim with a scalpel. Then…I would waittt… until the planarian stretched out to full length..and.. HIYAH! Chop it right behind the auricles (ear looking things). They’re speedy little guys, but I got the hang of the chop after the first 100.
Worm transport technique: The blast-n-suck-n-splat
During my decapitation procedures, I encountered an unexpected issue. The planaria were too tiny and slippery to transport from my motherload tupperware of worms to my imaging dish with fingers or tweezers. So, I developed my blast-n-suck-n-splat method, using a modified pipette with a larger opening. I BLAST the worm with water to get it unstuck from the plate then SSSUCK it into the pipette as it floats around the water, then quickly SPLAT! it into an imaging dish.
if I didn’t intensely focus here, the planarian would get stuck in the pipette and I would have to cut it out which is a HORRIBLE process
Keeping my babies fed
Online sources suggest feeding planarians raw beef liver. So I sourced a hunk of liver from my local viet grocery store, carefully sliced it into pea-sized pieces (ewww), and initiated a feeding frenzy.
Omg it pewped through its mouth-butt
While inspecting a planarian, it started convulsing. I was freaked out. Was it dying? Do planarian seizures exist?
Then it ejected a stream of poop. Oh. Yay?
Planaria eat through the pharynx, digest it, then poop out the indigestible stuff back out through the pharynx. There is but one hole. Also, those are flies in the comic, not hearts.
OH GOD THE SMELL
Planarians poop a lot, as I’ve unfortunately learned. A few hours after the liver feeding, the water was full of…sediment. So, when I cracked open the tupperware, I got smacked in the face with the most revolting sinus-trembling toe-clenching face-melting rotten seafood poop stench. I had to flush the container out with water multiple times, sprinting in and out of the restroom to get gulps of fresh air.
They want to leave my crib. Also I think I’m a grandma?
Two weeks into planarian motherhood (I spent a few weeks fattening them up to be a good, cuttable size), I took a close look at my tupperware of planarians and noticed that some had split in half on their own,.
Apparently, this means I’m an exceptional planarian mother. Fission indicates they’re well-fed and have enough accumulated energy to fragment.
For anyone interested…
fission/reproduction works like this:
- Body wall muscles contract to kardashianize the waist.
- The planarian anchors its tail ,and streeetccchhess the front forward
- It shimmies violently to increase tension at the waist (nearly 2000 pascals of tensile force!)
- Breaks, then the chunk decides whether to grow booty or head
- Neoblasts accumulate + redistribute. The whole worm actually undergoes morphallaxis, reorganizing to keep normal proportions.
Now that they’ve had kids, I guess that means they want to move out? Is this how my parents feel as I go to college (minus the kid part)? Too bad for them, I have more experiments i gotta do!
After a month of daily imaging planarians, spending 2-3 hrs a day pipetting, positioning, photographing, and re-scooping back into individual containers planarians 3000 times, I have officially become attached to these lovely creatures. Actually, I really love these charming little guys. Maybe worms aren’t so bad! I still hate snails though.
*blog inspired by i dissected a roach by Anika H. ’26, MEng ’27!