That’s Not a Snake. (Look Closer If You Dare.)

It may look like a snake, but don’t worry, it’s just a mass procession of “snakeworms.” (Is that better?) At least, that’s what Derek Sikes, a professor of entomology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, calls them.

These snakeworms are really a type of dusky-winged fungus gnat larvae. They migrate en masse, climbing over each other and forming a snake-like tube. Someone spotted one of these snakeworm migrations this week in Fairbanks, Alaska.

According to Alaska Public Media, the first report of these “unusual lines of moving gnat larvae” in Fairbanks was in 2007. Sikes told the news outlet that there have been “sporadic sightings” in the years since then.

Sikes and other researchers published a paper about “snakeworm” fungus gnats at the end of last year. The authors put forth that these gnats, which form larval masses that move in snake-like columns, represented a new species—Sciara serpens.

In the paper, the authors cite reports from Pennsylvania in the 1860s of larval masses that look like a “thin grey snake.” Clearly, these gnats have been forming weird larval-snake processions for a while now, but no one looked closely enough to realize they were actually an unrecognized species.

Learn more on Sikes’s university page here.

Header image courtesy of Jenna Hamm via Alaska Public Media

Source: https://outdoors.com/thats-not-a-snake-look-closer-if-you-dare/