Spectator competition winners: the worm who came back to life after 46,000 years

In Competition No. 3313, you were invited to supply a poem about the worms that were resurrected by scientists after being frozen in the Siberian permafrost for 46,000 years.

The tiny roundworms, buried deep underground since the late Pleistocene, were brought back to life by being immersed in water and transported to Germany – in a scientist’s pocket – to see what lessons the creatures might yield for 21st-century humanity. (They were, it was discovered, able to survive extreme low temperatures by entering a dormant state called cryptobiosis.)

Their remarkable story produced a smart, lively and varied entry. A commendation to W.J. Webster’s limerick:

A Pleistocene worm from Siberia,

Dug up in the frozen interior,

Had the permafrost thawed

And its life was restored:

Have you ever heard anything eerier?

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Lifelessly, deathlessly,

Slumbering nematodes

Icebound and layered in

Pleistocene rime,

Wait for millennia

Cryptobiotically,

Dormant and motionless,

Frozen in time.

Suddenly wakened by

Microbiologists,

Warming to Holocene

Life, they defy

Settled assumptions of

Geochronology;

Aeons have passed in the

Wink of an eye.

Alex Steelsmith

From the tundra’s underbelly,

We salute you, now defrosted:

Pretty perfect vermicelli

Mammoths might have once accosted.

It was chilly, so we reasoned

Doggo was the best existence –

Quiet, see-through, rather weazened,

Now we’ll fire on all pistons.

In the gulag, keep your head down:

That’s what underpinned our schema,

Why we wriggled in, to bed down

Snug beneath the iced Kolyma.

Now we’re on a Dresden lab slab,

Six-week stint, so no more maybes –

Parthenogenesis! It’s ab-fab –

Babies, babies, babies, babies!

Bill Greenwell

A frozen cradle in the permafrost

reveals the ancient worms’ unique location;

their instinct to survive was never lost

while waiting in suspended animation.

A petri dish assists their new nativity

and soon they squirm, they eat, they reproduce,

we see, through their asexual activity,

a hundred wriggling progeny let loose.

We’ll study them for hints, how to survive

the worst extremes of climate change, we may

discover all we need to stay alive,

with luck these nematodes will show the way.