In the summer of 2017, he finally got the opportunity to circle back and do some research on the ice worm when he arrived in Pullman to start a postdoc position in the laboratory of Associate Professor Joanna Kelley, senior author of the study who specializes in evolutionary genomics and extremophile lifeforms. Hotaling eventually went back to school and earned a PhD in biology at the University of Kentucky where he studied how climate change is affecting mountain biodiversity. meter, so dense you can’t walk without stepping in them.” “It is not a place where we think of life being able to flourish and these things can be present at like 200 per sq. “I wasn’t even a biology undergraduate yet but I remember being so fascinated by the fact that there is this worm that can live in a glacier,” he said. He was climbing at three in the morning when he noticed a lot of small, black worms crawling around on the surface of a glacier. Hotaling’s interest in ice worms began back in 2009 while he was working as a mountaineering ranger on the high elevation slopes of Mt. In the fall and winter, ice worms subsist deep beneath the surface of glaciers where temperatures stay around freezing. Millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of ice worms can be seen wriggling to the top of glaciers from the Chugach Mountains in southeast Alaska to the Cascade Volcanoes of Washington and Oregon during the summer months. What sets the ice worm apart from other members of the Mesenchytraeus genus is its ability to live its entire life in glacial ice. The ice worm resembles the common earthworm but is smaller and darker in color. The only reasonable explanation we can think of to explain this is birds.” Super cool organism
“But lo and behold, we found this one ice worm on Vancouver Island that is super closely related to ice worms in southern Alaska.
“If you are a worm isolated on a mountaintop glacier, the expectation is you aren’t going anywhere,” said Hotaling, a postdoctoral biology researcher. The researchers believe the genetic intermingling is the result of birds eating the glacier-bound worms (or their eggs) at one location and then dropping them off at another as they migrate up and down the west coast. Hotaling and colleagues also identified an ice worm on Vancouver Island that is closely related to a separate population of ice worms located 1,200 miles away in southern Alaska. He is the author of a new paper that shows ice worms in the interior of British Columbia have evolved into what may be a genetically distinct species from Alaskan ice worms. The ice worm is one of the largest organisms that spends its entire life in ice and Washington State University scientist Scott Hotaling is one of the only people on the planet studying it.
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