Although many will have heard of necrotising fasciitis, the dreadful disease caused by bacteria which devour living flesh, far fewer will have heard of dead flesh-eating maggots used by doctors to debride wounds. However today we are celebrating a new advance in animal technology: animals designed to eat unwanted manmade objects. Enter the worm, tiny  4 cm long worms with a single purpose, which have been genetically modified by Swansea University Genetics Department from Dendrobaena worms, small 30 gram ones normally used as live fish bait . These minute hermaphrodites spend their brief lives eating plastic. They were developed jointly by Swansea University Departments of  Nanotechnology, Biochemistry and Genetics.

Why worms? Basically worms are  very simple creatures with a simple genetic structure. Because they are hermaphrodites they can reproduce themselves very fast and retain the same simple genetic structure without variation. They are well suited for research in nanotechnology.