#nemotode

“When James put his slides into the humidity chamber, he had no notion of what these nematodes would be facing, and so no expectation of what he would find. But when the slides came back out, what he observed was something he'd only seen once before, in a drawing done two years ago by one of his close friends, Katelyn Solbakk. In it, you can see a nematode whose body has been clinched into segments by some kind of bulbous... thing. What you're seeing is the fungus' most brutal design. But to get there, it must morph from decomposer to predator--no longer consuming what has already been dead, but actively killing..”

Journey to the Microcosmos- The Fungus That Traps and Kills Nematodes

Images Originally Captured by Jam’s Germs

In Order: Phacus gigas 400x, Cercaria 200x, Diatom attracts bacteria 400x, Closterium and Surirella 400x, Euglena 400x, Diatoms and green algea 400x, Stentor polymorphus 40x, Nemotode 200x

Nematodes can withstand huge pressures, too. When the Space Shuttle Columbia broke up during re-entry in 2003, a biological experiment on board containing nematodes made a free fall from an altitude as high as 42 km. Their canister hit the ground with a force of roughly 2,500 g. (Transient centrifugation at up to 10,000 gs, which would liquefy a human, is a common manipulation in standard nematode laboratory procedures.) A few weeks later, the experiment was recovered. The nematodes inside the canister had not only survived the ordeal, they were reproducing.

The OpenWorm project is aimed at creating the first artificial lifeform – a bottom-up computer model of a millimeter-sized nemotode, one of the simplest known multicellular organisms.