Live a life as a nematode

A microscopic roundworm. A handful of soil holds thousands of them. About 4.4 × 10²⁰ soil nematodes are alive right now.

Sources: van den Hoogen et al. 2019, “Soil nematode abundance and functional group composition at a global scale”, Nature 572.

Your life

1. Hour 1 · You are an egg in the soil of a forest floor in Siberia, one of several million roundworms in this square metre.
2. Day 1 · You hatch, molt inside the shell and wriggle out: transparent, a fraction of a millimetre long.
3. Day 2 · You glide through the film of water around soil grains, eating bacteria.
4. Day 3 · Another molt. If you are like the lab worm C. elegans, you get by on 302 neurons, enough to follow the smell of food.
5. Day 5 · You pass a fungus that traps worms with tiny rings that snap shut. You slip by.
6. Day 6 · Adult. You lay eggs, about 300 of them, each a new life in the dark.
7. Week 2 · The soil is warm and wet. You keep eating, keep laying, keep going.

Get rebornEvery number and its source