“It was completely ‘X Files’ to me,' UAF entomologist Derek Sikes said of the first time he saw one of these columns of gnat snakeworm larvae. 'I had never heard of or seen this phenomenon before.'
A Camp Denali staff member spotted this column of gnat snakeworm larvae on July 8.
O’Brien is the housekeeping and serving coordinator at the lodge, which is in the Kantishna area at Mile 89 of the road that cuts through Denali National Park and Preserve.called a gnat snakeworm. In Sikes has been studying these Alaska insects since a docent at the Museum of the North brought in a picture of the larvae and some specimens back in 2007.And he wasn’t the only one. Despite how conspicuous the formation looked, longtime naturalists hadn’t seen it in the state either, Sikes said.
He then raised some of the larvae into adult flies, which allowed him to figure out what type of flies they were. By looking at their DNA and studying their anatomy years later, Sikes determined these gnat snakeworms were a new species, distinct from their closest relatives in Europe — which are also known to move in a similar mass procession.
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