In a crowded room, we naturally move slower than in an empty space. Surprisingly, worms can show the exact opposite behavior: In an environment with randomly scattered obstacles, they tend to move faster when there are more obstructions. Viewing the worms as “active, polymerlike matter,” researchers at the University of Amsterdam have now explained this surprising fact.

The research was published in Physical Review Letters this week, and was selected by the editors of that journal as an Editors’ Suggestion.

One way in which worms differ from humans is, of course, their shape: a worm’s length is much larger than its width (i.e., it is spaghetti-like), and moreover it is wiggly—or in more scientific terms: It behaves like an active polymer. The researchers suspected that this active, polymer-like behavior is what makes the worms behave in their counterintuitive way.