Are the Sandworms of Dune Really Worms?
Reading Time: 5 minutesWorms don’t move like that!, Dune sandworms: How do they move so fast? We asked scientists.
The sandworms of Dune have more than earned their spot atop the pantheon of iconic sci-fi creatures. Dune author Frank Herbert’s gargantuan autotrophs have served as the blueprint for generations of other monster designs, like Beetlejuice‘s sandworm, the tunneling graboids from Tremors, and at least two Star Wars creatures. Though the sandworm is inspired, plotwise, by dragons, part of its allure comes from its simplicity: In the new blockbuster Dune: Part Two, as well as 2021’s Part One, the fact that the so-called Shai-Hulud look so much like oversize iterations of squirmy creatures that crawl our own earth makes them feel, if still extraordinary, more plausible.
That’s why, when I first saw Timothée Chalamet summoning and riding a sandworm as Paul Atreides in Part Two, I was shocked to see the creature barreling through the desert sand like a high-speed train. Zero wiggling. Zero swerving. It somehow feels like the least realistic part of the scene (in which, again, a man with the same face as next-gen Willy Wonka is riding a giant space worm).
The Dune movies routinely establish that biology doesn’t play by Earth rules, even for humans, on the sand planet Arrakis. But physics—namely, gravity—does. Even the hefty tyrant Baron Harkonnen needs a rig to get around. Could the worms really move so effortlessly, even through all that sand?
Looking for answers on our own planet begins with the sandworm’s namesake—the humble earthworm. Before they become dried-out bits of gunk on your driveway, earthworms spend their lives employing one of the most interesting propulsion methods found in fauna (it serves as a popular inspiration in robotics). Each ring around their bodies is a muscle that controls a pocket filled with fluid. These small segments are partitioned off from one another, which ‘seals off the fluid and makes a water balloon,’ explains Bruce Jayne, a biology professor and animal locomotion researcher at the University of Cincinnati. These liquid chambers alternately bulge and elongate, creating a visible and slow wavelike ripple along a worm’s body, scooting it forward.
On smoothness and softness alone, this rules out any strong structural relation between an earthworm and Chalamet’s sandworm, which in the films appears to have some sort of free-edged plate ringing its body instead. And the gargantuan creatures are never shown scooting.
Their movement through the sand appears closer to the fluidity of a snake than to the stepwise undulations of an earthworm. Collectively, snakes have nearly half a dozen modes of propulsion that they use; the way any one species moves depends on the construction of their bodies and how they interact with their typical habitats. Most methods of snake locomotion involve some pattern of curling up and straightening out again, such as concertina movement, scrunching their tails up toward their heads and pushing out headfirst, or lateral undulation, tensing and flexing alternating muscles in a sort of continuous wiggle. These and most other serpentine locomotive strategies would shift a passenger side to side in a way that would make any creature a bumpy ride for, say, a tribal culture harboring a burgeoning intergalactic conqueror in a desert world. Henry Astley, an assistant professor at the University of Akron’s Biomimicry Research and Innovation Center who teaches a course dedicated to the real-world biology that inspires fictional monsters, says that the pairing of a softer skin with protective plates that Herbert describes in his novels is definitely more snakelike than wormlike. But, he says, clips of Dune‘s sandworms didn’t immediately bring any specific snakes to mind. Instead, ‘they move as if they’re a worm being dragged on a string.’
Some snakes do travel in these straight lines. Certain species, like the pythons, have specialized muscles that connect their ribs directly to their skin, allowing them to use just the skin on their undersides to push against the ground and move forward. In this crawl, called rectilinear locomotion, ‘the skeleton is basically sliding inside of the skin,’ says Jayne. This is more or less the most fluid style of movement a long and thin creature is capable of, particularly if you’re looking to move over a flat, still surface. ‘In contrast to the earthworm, you don’t get a deformation of the body shape,’ says Jayne.
But keep in mind, says Astley, that the sandworms Paul encounters in both new Dune films are also excellent burrowers, capable of traveling distances while entirely submerged in sand and popping their spiny maws out skyward to swallow vehicles whole. Although rectilinear movement works well on flat ground, a burrowing movement ‘has to go all the way around the body’ simply because the same friction exists on all sides of a creature.
There is, however, one group of burrowing creatures that uses rectilinear locomotion. They’re called amphisbaenians, or worm lizards, and up close, they look a lot like the giants of Arrakis, minus the black hole of a sci-fi mouth. And they’re even burrowers, used to moving through granular material.
Jayne and Astley agree that amphisbaenians share more features with Dune‘s creatures than any other group of organisms do. But when I ran this comparison by Daniel Goldman, an experimental physicist at Georgia Tech who studies animal movement in complex materials like sand, he wasn’t as convinced. To him, the key problem is that there just aren’t creatures on Earth capable of taking off at, then maintaining, the sandworm’s breakneck speed in a medium that has the friction of sand, a feat that is particularly impressive given that the worms do not have limbs to help propel them. (I’ve concluded that giant sandworms have no hidden tiny feet because there are none included in the excellent 360-degree view of the creatures provided by the officially licensed AMC Theatres Dune popcorn bucket, and those are the rules.)
But sand itself is a sort of magical medium. ‘Sand can flow from a solid to fluidlike state,’ says Goldman, particularly as something or someone moves through it. In Dune: Part One, we see this effect represented, as Chalamet’s Paul seems to sink into sand he was standing on moments before when a sandworm moves nearby.
With a little sci-fi conjecture, Goldman can imagine that as long as sandworms always start from a dive, then keep moving, they might only ever experience the namesake dunes as a waterlike medium. If the worms were as simple-bodied as can be, and filled with fluid themselves like real worms, ‘you wouldn’t even have to move the fluid very far to generate large pressure changes,’ Goldman adds. And large pressure changes—like, giant-sandworm large—could generate large propulsive forces, and large speeds, large enough even to impress some Fremen.
Like I said before, most worms on planet Earth—well, those visible to the naked eye— have a lot of chambers and undulate, which isn’t very sandworm-ish. But Goldman points to the teeny-tiny nematode, or roundworm, as a possible sandworm cousin. These little guys live in basically every natural setting in the world, including deserts, soils, and, in particularly unlucky cases, the sludges of the human body. The ‘particular mechanical properties’ of their gel-like environments are similar to sand in many ways, Goldman says. Their bodies are essentially built of one water-balloon chamber, rather than many; they also have long, specialized muscle tissue running down the length. In nematodes, there’s no bulging with movement, like in earthworms, or a skeletal structure to navigate with, like in snakes. With the giant sandworm’s thick skin/otherworldly armor, the slight side-to-side movement that generates propulsion could be barely perceptible to the human eye or to riders.
Now, if I were an alien animal that had to exert extra energy and ‘swim’ constantly in a medium that would turn into a ton of bricks if I stopped moving, all to live underground, I might just choose to spend more time chilling on top of the sand instead. But maybe evolution on Arrakis hasn’t yet fine-tuned in the name of efficiency—and perhaps that’s why the giant sandworms seem so pissed off all the time.
So, do the universe’s largest fictional creatures share qualities with some of the tiniest we’ve observed? Are they more like amphisbaenians? The answer, for now, can be whatever you want it to be. What I want is for director Denis Villeneuve to quit being a coward and show me how the worms move in the next Dune movie.
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2024/03/dune-part-two-sandworms-biology-physics-snakes.html
Ref: slate
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