The effects of groove height and substrate stiffness on C. elegans locomotion

The physical environment surrounding an animal has a significant impact on its behavior. The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) has proved to be an excellent choice for understanding the adaptability of organisms crawling on soft surfaces. In this work, we investigate the modulation of C. elegans' behavioral kinematics in response to changes in the stiffness of the substrate and study the effect of grooves incised by the worms on their locomotion speed and efficiency. We measure the height of the grooves created by the animals on surfaces with different rigidity using confocal microscopy. Our results indicate that the kinematic properties of C. elegans, including amplitude (A), wavelength (λ) and frequency (f) of head turns depend strongly on surface properties and the height of the grooves created by them. During crawling, we observe that the animal assumes two distinct shapes depending on the stiffness of substrates. As the stiffness increases, the worm's body shape changes gradually from a 'W' shape, which is characterized by low amplitude curvature to the more common 'S' shape, which is characterized by high amplitude curvature, at intermediate values and back to 'W' on stiffer substrates. Although the efficiency is found to vary monotonically with surface stiffness, the forward velocity shows a non-monotonic behavior with the maximum on a surface, where the animal makes the 'S' shape.