MARINE worms chisel their way through mud. They use their wedge-shaped heads to generate cracks through which they can then easily crawl, a technique that makes worms far more efficient burrowers than we thought.
Kelly Dorgan at the University of Maine and her colleagues filled five glass aquariums with gelatin, which has similar biomechanical properties to marine sediments, and added a worm, Neresis virens.
The team calculate that when the worm turns its mouth and face inside out to push apart the edges of the burrow, it uses a maximum force of just 0.023 newtons. This pressure would be…
