Question: What do you find interesting about watching worms?

Rachel McMullan answered on 8 Nov 2015:

Hi
Thanks for your question.
First of all the worms I use are really beautiful to watch. They’re see-through under the microscope so we can see their gut, brain and the eggs inside them without having to cut them open. They move like a wave and leave wavy tracks across the plates which can make beautiful patterns.
As well as being beautiful the worms are really useful to scientists.
The worms are really simple but they have a lot in common with us and that’s makes them really, really interesting to me. Hopefully what we learn from worms will tell us something about human biology. This story might help explain what I mean a bit better.
Imagine you’re an alien and you arrive on earth. The first thing you see is a motorbike. You want to know how the motorbike works but it’s really, really complicated and if you take it apart you might not be able to fix it. But next to the motorbike is a pedal bicycle. It looks a bit like the motorbike, both have wheels and handlebars, but it is a lot simpler. You take the wheel off the pedal bike and it doesn’t work anymore. When you put the wheel back on it works again. The wheel must be important to make the pedal bike work. If wheels are important to make the pedal bike work perhaps they are also important to make the motorbike work.
Its a bit like this with worms and humans. The worm is the pedal bike in my story and humans are the motorbike. Things we learn from doing experiments in worms might help us understand more about human biology.

Rachel