The British poet of the YukonRobert W. Service wrote a poem, "Ballad of the Ice-worm Cocktail", in which a fake ice worm made of spaghetti is the subject of a bar bet. This may have contributed to the impression that ice worms are mythical creatures.
The small town of Cordova, Alaska has an annual Ice Worm Festival in February, in which a long imitation ice worm is paraded through the streets rather like a Chinese new yeardragon dance.
Recently, methane clathrate deposits in the ocean floor have been found to be inhabited by polychaete worms of the species Hesiocaeca methanicola.
IceWorms are gigantic wormlike creatures with leathery skin that ranges in color from dirty white to muddy brown.
Iceworms can live in any arctic environment if there is enough food, and they are capable of going dormant and surviving for up to five years without eating anything.
IceWorms tend to control their own population - they don't reproduce unless there is an overabundance of food, and if the food gets short, they go looking for it fight with any other Worms they encounter.
Iceworms are unique creatures, one of the few animals to complete their life cycle solely on glacialice.
Far from the giant iceworms of legend or the spaghetti-strand worms of joke, true iceworms are small creatures, averaging in length from a few millimetres to a centimetre (0.10 to 0.4 inches), and a millimetre (0.04 inches) or less in diameter.
Iceworms generally congregate in great colonies that have been estimated to contain from hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of individuals, covering as much as 12 hectares (30 acres) of the glacial surface.
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