“They certainly are vicious!” Wonderly confirmed. Bloodworms are also easily provoked into battle with members of their own species, and their sudden strikes can even send humans to the hospital with severe allergic reactions. Their venomous four-pronged fangs can puncture through hard-shelled mollusks and crustaceans, efficiently killing these animals. The way these animals deploy these metal-reinforced jaws in the wild is like something out of an otherworldly horror movie: The worms turn their digestive system inside-out and launch an appendage, called an eversible proboscis, at their prey. Likewise, other organisms have been observed using “ionic copper in a variety of contexts,” Wonderly noted, though “there are none that I am aware of that store copper mineral-particularly atacamite-in a load-bearing material.” “Proteins are a hugely important component in how biological organisms template and synthesize materials, so finding the protein used in bloodworm jaws may help us understand how to unlock novel strategies for melanin synthesis.”Īll animals have some metals circulating in their bodies, but the fang-like jaws of bloodworms contain “significant quantities of copper (up to 10% by weight),” reports the new study. “The question that intrigued me the most was-how do these worms grow melanin at such a large lengthscales?” he added. “When I joined the Waite Lab, I had recently read Frank Herbert’s Dune, so I jumped at the opportunity to work with real life sand worms.” “This is amazing because there are very few examples in nature of melanin being used as a load-bearing material grown at millimeter length scales!” Wonderly said in an email. Since the 1980s, Waite has overseen many discoveries about the incredible properties of bloodworm jaws, but Wonderly was particularly interested in the role of melanin, a type of pigment, as a major component of these unusual body parts. Wonderly is the latest in a line of researchers who have worked with these temperamental worms at UCSB’s Waite Lab, led by biochemist Herbert Waite, who is the senior author of the study. The results identified the crucial role of a specific multi-tasking protein (MTP) in the “impressive wear resistance” of bloodworm jaws, a finding that holds “tremendous potential for bio-inspired and natural materials processing,” according to a study published on Monday in the journal Matter. Now, scientists led by William Wonderly, a graduate student at the University of California Santa Barbara, have solved some of the open questions about how and why these animals evolved this mouthful of copper.
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