Here’s a tantalising quote from the 1914 edition of the Yearbook of the United States Department of Agriculture:
“If all the matter in the universe except the nematodes were swept away, our world would still be dimly recognizable, and if, as disembodied spirits, we could then investigate it, we should find its mountains, hills, vales, rivers, lakes and oceans represented by a thin film of nematodes. The location of towns would be decipherable, since for every massing of human beings there would be a corresponding massing of certain nematodes. Trees would still stand in ghostly rows representing our streets and highways. The location of the various plants and animals would still be decipherable, and, had we sufficient knowledge, in many cases even their species could be determined by an examination of their erstwhile nematode parasites.”
I’m beginning to get interested (again) in nematodes for a number of reasons. Firstly I remember the excitement when I first saw one when I first started to use my biological microscope (which I am missing a lot), secondly I love this idea of their super abundance as an indicator of all sorts of other biological systems (nematode tricorder?), thirdly they are one of the model organisms, a group of organisms of which the most symbolic must be the E Coli bacterium and the fruit fly Drosophila that are used as experimental ‘work horses’, fourthly because C Elegans was the first multicellular organism to have its genome comletely sequenced and fifthly because they survived the STS-107 mission disaster aboard the Columbia space shuttle.
I have vague ideas about subjecting nematodes out on the moors to amplified signals from GPS satellites…