In Search of the Death-Worm

Ivan Seeking

http://www.mania.com/lair-beasts-sea...cle_87259.html

OAQfirst

I wonder if they'd be good eating.

Borek

With or without spice?

OAQfirst

Hmm, maybe it'd make a good lure for catching the Loch Ness Monster.

CEL

At least El Blanco only kills for eating, while this worm has killed an entire herd of camels just for fun.

bassplayer142

I could never understand how an animal could travel through sand in a quick manner. Just watching the movie tremors is ridiculous enough for me. That is unless this death worm has tunnels that should have been found when the camels were found.

Ivan Seeking

Shooting from the hip: I can easily imagine one way to account for this claim when combined with the claim of electrocution: The herd was hit by lightning. This sometimes happens to herds of cows, and the effects of a nearby strike are greatest in the presense of dielectric materials, like sand - the electric potential between the legs of the animal is maximized.

I wonder if the death-worm is known to leave a trail of glass - fulgurites?

In fact it occurs to me that fulgurites can even look like giant worms.
http://www.minresco.com/fulgurites/fulimages/tx114b.jpg
But I have never seen a red one.
http://www.minresco.com/fulgurites/fulgurites.htm

Ivan Seeking

Another tempting anecdote: They are said to appear in conjunction with rain storms.

http://www.virtuescience.com/mongolian-death-worm.html

Moonbear

GROOOOOOAAAAAANNNNNN!!!!
Oh, they mean earthworms!

Ivan Seeking

Um, er, I was thinking of lightning.

Moonbear

Or that. That's the cool thing about mythology, at least to me (and I'd consider death-worms to fall under the category of mythology)...if you think about it long enough, you can see how natural phenomena might have gotten interpreted in such interesting ways. A streak of lightning viewed as a worm...yeah, that could make sense.

Ivan Seeking

What I find a bit interesting is that few people claim to have actually seen one. Even the anecdotes often refer to indirect evidence that might be explained in part by lightning - the ability to kill many animals with one strike, and perhaps even the wormlike structures that can be left in the sand by a lightning strike. But then there are explicit descriptions of them that would be completely inconsistent with this idea. However, it wouldn't be surprising to find that there are a couple of explanations that account for the myth.

From my point of view, what would be unusual is to have such a pervasive myth for no reason whatsoever. There should be either a strong cultural motivation, such as religion, or real phenomena that have been interpreted improperly...or there is a five foot blood-worm that spits acid and electrocutes camels.