Ice Worms

"A cocktail I can understand--but what's an ice-worm please?"
Said Deacon White:
It is not strange that you should fail to know,
since ice-worms are peculiar to the Mountain of Blue Snow."

And so Robert Service's barroom heroes led Major Brown down the snowy path to belief that ice worms really do exist. Before his eyes was placed a bottleful, picked and put away to show the scientific guys .

"Their bellies were a bilious blue, their eyes a bulbous red,
Their backs were grey, and gross were they, and hideous of head.
And when with gusto and a fork the barman speared one out,
It must have gone four inches from its tail-tip to its snout."

Robert Service perhaps knew that real ice worms were discovered on the Muir Glacier in 1887. Ann Saling, writing in the March 1978 issue of Search, tells much of what is known about ice worms. They live in the coastal glaciers of southeastern Alaska and as far south as Mount Rainier.

Four species are known, ranging in length from 1 to 3 cm (an inch more or less). Nearly as colorful as the ice worm concocted by Service, real ice worms can be white, yellow, brown or black.

Squirming around between crystals of ice and through the many interconnected channels in granular snow, ice worms generally stay near the surface of glaciers. Most species of ice worms rise to the surface at dusk, where as many as a hundred in one square meter can be observed. During the day some species remain in puddles of meltwater where they anchor their front halves in the ice--for reasons not explained.

Ice worms eat airborne pollen grains, fern spores and the red algae that lives in snow and sometimes colors it pink. Unable to exist at temperatures much below freezing, ice worms must remain in temperate glaciers. The only ice worms ranging as far north as Dawson were the four-inch giants that Robert Service's Sheriff Black, Skipper Grey and Deacon White fashioned of spaghetti and ink.