You might naturally expect a wide, open path to be faster and easier to navigate than a narrow one, just as birds fly freely through the open sky, cars move quickly on empty roads, and a wide hallway seems easier when trying to exit a building.

However, many organisms do not have the option to move through open spaces. Whether burrowing through soil or swimming through water, they’re forced to maneuver through narrow gaps in tiny pores, rocks, roots, plants or other obstacles.

My team’s recent research on California blackworms suggests that, sometimes, such narrower paths are faster. And these findings could have implications for building specialized robots.

I’m a physicist who studies living systems. I work in Saad Bhamla’s lab, where we ask simple questions about nature and uncover the rich physics behind them. Being part of the lab often reminds me of my childhood in Kerala, India, where I spent countless hours outdoors watching and playing with the tiny organisms around me. My research brings me the same sense of wonder, only now as a physicist.

One of the most extensively studied organisms in our lab is the California blackworm, Lumbriculus variegatus. In groups, these aquatic worms, roughly a few-centimeters long, weave themselves into tangled structures that resemble bundles of thread or noodles in a bowl, but are alive.

For one project, our group investigated how collections of worms behave under confinement, through experiments led by Ph.D. student Paulami Sarkar. During our discussions, I began wondering whether we could build a simple computational model that captured the essential physics that tangled these worms together.

Justin Xu, an undergraduate student whom I was mentoring in computational research, joined the project,........

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