FARMINGTON — When Nancy Prentiss tells people about her studies, they tend to squirm.

Called “the worm lady” by some students, Prentiss studies and identifies marine worms that live in the shallow waters off St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands since 2007.

The tiny organisms, some smaller than an eyelash, play a significant role in the marine ecosystem, she said Thursday.

“They can be quite extraordinarily beautiful, very ornate and colorful,” she said.

Prentiss, a longtime faculty member at the University of Maine at Farmington, received a $33,000 National Science Foundation grant last summer to help develop a database of the polychaete, or worm.

The Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research grant has helped purchase collection equipment, including microscopes, and provided for travel expenses, she said.

Her work has drawn attention from other polychaete experts and researchers from Greece, Australia and Mexico.

She has developed a marine biology course at UMF and takes about 16 students to the Caribbean each May to study the tropical island ecology.

A sabbatical from UMF in 2009 provided the time for her to indulge in her research and really “gave it a springboard to take off,” she said.

Her interest began in the early 1980s. After receiving a degree in botany from the University of Maine at Orono, she wanted to pursue a graduate degree in marine biology. A professor had a medical research grant to study marine worms found on the coast of Maine.

She thought she would work with “more glamorous” sea life such as turtles or colorful fish, but the work paid for most of her master’s degree and in the process she learned to identify marine worms found in every ocean throughout the world, she said.

Prentiss began to look at marine worms in the Caribbean while working in a marine lab in St. Croix. There was a lot of research being done on coral reefs and turtles but not much focus on worms.

Many fish depend on these worms and they can make organic material available to larger fish, she said. Some worms disappear in polluted waters while others thrive.

The worms are not always beneficial. Some worms can wreak havoc on the shellfish industry. Other worms can carpet the ocean floor. They’re beautiful but damaging, she said. New Zealand spent several million dollars trying to eradicate a non-native worm from its seabeds in harbors, she said.

There are tens of thousands of species in seas across the globe. Many have not been identified and their importance to the marine ecosystem is not recognized.

“When I look at something I refer to it as either a treasure chest or opening a Pandora’s box,” she said of the sediment, dead coral, old algae and seaweed that she studies, some of it handled with an eye dropper because it’s so fragile.

“I never cease to be amazed at the little worms that come crawling out. Ones that no one has ever seen or looked at before,” she said.

The worms also play a role as an indicator of environmental stress.

“Polychaetes are like the proverbial canary in a coal mine when it comes to understanding what’s happening in a marine environment,” she said in a release. “My research gathers the kind of data that can shed light on the interconnections between marine worms and other marine organisms and help scientists understand the health status of a marine ecosystem.”

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