Worm colonies

Worm colonies are presented as more than an unusual deep-sea population: in the scientists’ reconstruction of a Yrr strategy, they are a means of altering the seabed on a continental scale. Bred and transported with Bacteria, they attack methane hydrates and prepare a slope for collapse. Yet the colonies cannot trigger the final catastrophe by themselves. That gap between groundwork and trigger makes them both a biological instrument and a revealing measure of the Yrr’s capacity to coordinate life across scales.

Role in the proposed Yrr strategy

The clearest account of the colonies comes as Anawak asks the others to imagine the problem from the perspective of a Yrr collective. In that scenario, the collective has infested an entire continental slope with worms it previously bred, packed with Bacteria, and moved across the seabed. Their task is to destroy the hydrates along the slope. The description assigns the colonies an organized place in a larger operation, but it is explicitly presented as a reasoning exercise: the characters are working out what a Yrr collective might do, not reporting a complete, directly observed sequence of events.

Johanson confirms the crucial limitation in the scenario. Worms and Bacteria can carry out the groundwork, but something else is needed before the slope gives way. The colonies are therefore not depicted as independently causing a landslide. Their activity alters the conditions beneath the seabed; a further shift must push the system into collapse. This distinction matters to the logic of the threat: biological damage can accumulate without immediately producing the spectacular geological event that follows.

The growth curves and estimates being prepared by researchers in Kiel give the colonies a second, more analytical role. Suess’s planned email to Bohrmann contains data on worm-colony growth and estimates of what similar invasions might do elsewhere. But the transatlantic cable is severed in the seabed disaster, and the email never reaches its intended recipient. The interruption does not change what the growth curves measure; it prevents that information from moving through the network at the moment scientists are trying to assess the scale of the danger.

From hydrate damage to slope collapse

The proposed missing trigger is a change in pressure or temperature. A small drop in water level could reduce pressure on the hydrates; alternatively, warmer water near the continental slope could destabilize them. In the discussion, the participants consider a rise of one degree Celsius and then judge that two degrees would be a surer threshold. The numbers belong to their working example, not to a reported measurement of a completed Yrr action.

To explain how the additional warmth might be delivered, the group turns to the Hakon-Mosby mud volcano, located near the Norwegian continental slope at a depth of 1,250 metres. It vents gas, water, and sediment from within the earth onto the seabed. Although its surrounding water is not hot, it is warmer than the water elsewhere. In the proposed mechanism, an enormous Yrr collective gathers into a funnel extending across several kilometres. Its walls are only several cells thick, while its circumference—about 500 metres—matches the mud volcano’s main crater. The structure draws warmer water from the volcano and transports it to the slope where the worms and Bacteria have been working.

In this account, the colonies and the funnel solve different parts of one problem. The worms and their associated Bacteria weaken the hydrate-bearing slope; the collective’s channel of warmer water supplies the additional destabilizing condition. The resulting collapse is the projected outcome of their combined effects, rather than a power attributed to the worm colonies alone. The same hypothetical method is extended to warming waters near Greenland and around the poles, potentially melting ice caps and disabling the Gulf Stream. That extension makes the colonies part of a much wider scenario, while keeping the distinction between the worms’ local work and the collective’s capacity to manipulate its environment.

A collective capable of acting at scale

The larger explanation depends on how the Yrr themselves are thought to communicate and aggregate. Oliviera compares their behavior with that of Myxococcus xanthus: when individual cells lack nutrients, they emit a chemical signal; as more cells signal, the growing intensity eventually draws the swarm together into a visible fruiting body. The comparison supplies a biological analogy for aggregation, not an identification of the worm colonies with the Yrr. In the account of the Yrr, a pheromone attracts free-floating amoebas over short distances, while paired receptors are proposed to distinguish membership in the collective from healthy membership capable of participating in it.

That model helps make the proposed engineering of the worms intelligible. The Yrr are imagined not as a single large animal directing each worm, but as a collective whose aggregated cells can coordinate action and adopt forms suited to a task. In a separate computer-model example, complex challenges lead the electronic Yrr to aggregate more often, devise unprogrammed strategies, examine objects at extremely small scales, and share experience among their cells. These results are presented as limited experimental findings and a basis for speculation about real Yrr, not as proof that every capability of the model has been observed in nature.

Ecological and narrative significance

The worm colonies connect a small biological process to a geological and climatic cascade. Their feeding and associated Bacteria are the slow preparatory stage; hydrate destabilization and slope collapse are the anticipated consequences once an additional environmental condition is supplied. In the closing account of the ocean’s changing circulation, fresh water from rapidly melting ice dilutes the cold, salt-laden flows that feed the North Atlantic pump. The pump is slowing, the ocean conveyor is weakening, and the warm current from the tropics is drying up. This later picture gives the proposed polar consequences a wider context, though it does not establish that the worm colonies directly caused those changes.

The colonies thus occupy an uneasy boundary between ecology and infrastructure. They are living organisms in the seabed, but the scenario treats their placement and effects as components of a large-scale operation: breed them, transport them, let them alter the hydrates, then supply the missing environmental trigger. At the same time, the interrupted email about their growth curves shows how dependent human understanding remains on vulnerable communications systems. The colonies’ significance lies not in a single isolated act, but in how their distributed work can become legible only as part of a chain linking biological activity, seabed geology, climate, and the human effort to exchange evidence.