Image: Cynthia Pflughoeft found this tapeworm at Eielson Air Force Base. Photo by Cynthia Pflughoeft A few times each week, someone carries something dead or alive through the doors of the University of Alaska Museum of the North, hoping an expert can identify it. A couple weeks ago, a woman arrived with a small jar […]
Life exists everywhere you look. Even on glacier ice, home to inch-long worms, snow fleas, bacteria and algae. When gathered by the millions on the ice, algae cells can help make the water they need to survive. Alaska scientists recently studied this living agent of glacier melt. “If you went to a place on a […]
Under its own power, an earthworm gains about 30 feet of new territory each year. But that does not help explain how worms got to Alaska. “It’s almost geologically slow,” Matt Bowser, said of the earthworm’s locomotion. Bowser, Alaska’s closest thing to an expert on earthworms, is an entomologist with the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge. […]