What Do These Worms and People Have in Common?
They’re more like people than you think!
Ok, we’re talking worms here. Not the kind you think about when you hear the word, worms!
Not the nightcrawlers you go looking for at night with a flashlight to use as bait to catch that monster fish you’ve been dreaming about.
And not the earthworms you find in your garden or your worm bin. Well, if you looked really really closely you probably could find them in your worm bin or compost pile.
And not those parasitic ones that get inside you and can make you pretty sick.
So what kind of worm is this?
It’s a very tiny little-known worm that lots of biological scientists study.
And it doesn’t even have a common name. They are called by their Latin taxonomic name: Caenorhabditis elegans*.
*The name is derived from the Greek caeno- (recent), rhabditis (rod-like) and the Latin elegans (elegant). So they are recently discovered or evolved elegant rod-like creatures.It turns out that studying these tiny worms will help us understand human diseases and biology because many of their genes and organ systems are quite similar to ours.
