A bizarre 'snake worm' has baffled scientists for over a decade, now they know what it is

Researchers have solved Alaska's "snake worm" mystery after discovering a new species of fungus-eating fly whose juveniles band together and slither around like a long, gray serpent. 

The snake worm mystery began more than 16 years ago in the summer of 2007, when Ester resident Maggie Billington spotted thousands of tiny, wormlike larvae crawling across a road in a long line. 

Billington was a volunteer at the University of Alaska Museum of the North in Fairbanks at the time, so she documented the bizarre sighting and brought photos and samples to Derek Sikes, the museum's curator of insects. 

"I figured they must be fly larvae but had never heard of this snakeworm phenomenon," Sikes said in a statement. "I was dumbfounded. This was totally an X-Files case for me."

Sikes and his colleagues have now identified the larvae in a new study published Dec. 30 in the journal Integrative Systematics: Stuttgart Contributions to Natural History. The species, which they've named Sciara serpens, is one of several scarcely studied flies in which the larvae appear to mimic snakes.

The researchers speculated that these larvae take the shape of a snake to scare off birds and other would-be predators or to preserve moisture on dry ground by crawling over one another in a line.

Related: Tortoise beetle larvae use their telescopic anuses to build shields from shed skin and poop