Acidic and non-parasitic
Who doesn’t enjoy a healthy dose of vinegar with their French fries? While most people would disagree, and say that ketchup is their condiment of choice for crispy fried potatoes, consider the second ingredient in ketchup after tomatoes. (Hint: it’s vinegar.)
Well the next time you have vinegar, whether it’s in ketchup, salad dressing, or on its own, think about what could be living in it – a non-parasitic microscopic organism called the vinegar eel (Turbatrix aceti).
What a vinegar world!
Vinegar is a liquid consisting mainly of acetic acid (CH3CO2H) and water, produced during the fermentation process of ethanol by acetic acid bacteria. Basically anything that has sugar in it and is exposed to air will turn into vinegar.
From the early days of Greek physician Hippocrates, vinegar is deeply rooted in history and comes from the French compound word “vin aigre” (sour wine). Today, besides being used for food, vinegar has many other uses:
- As a cleaning agent
- As a natural herbicide
- To help manage diets by increasing satiety (the feeling of fullness)
- For medicinal purposes (managing diabetes, as a clotting agent, healing burns and skin inflammations, or for relief of headaches caused by heat)
But what’s living in MY vinegar?
Vinegar eels are round worms we call nematodes and not actual eels. They feed on the live bacteria and yeast culture used to produce vinegar.
Vinegar Eel
These free-living nematodes can be found in unfiltered vinegar and are often raised and fed to fish fry as a live food.
They are about 1/16th of an inch (2mm) long and feed on the bacteria of apples, so apple cider vinegar is a great source of these yummy microworms.
The good news is that vinegar eels are normally filtered or pasteurized prior to bottling and don’t make it into the meals of most consumers. Rest assured the next time you pour some dressing on your salad or bite into a pickle, the vinegar eel didn’t make the cut and you won’t have any extra protein floating its way into your mouth.
Vinegar eels at home
Looking to see these worms in action anyway? The good news is that raising your very own vinegar eels is easy.
Place an apple into a glass container large enough to hold one part water to one part apple cider and leave the experiment for about a month. Make sure to put a lid on the glass container so that no other bugs or critters fall victim to your yummy science experiment.
You can put a small hole in the lid if you wish. You can use tap water for this experiment; however, you should let it stand for a few days to let the chlorine evaporate from it. The apple will provide some extra nourishment.
All you need now is a microscope and a few friends to witness this unbelievable event, as hundreds of little eel-like nematodes swim through your very own homemade vinegar, believe it or not!
Brought to you by Stephen Smith, Staff Scientist at Science North.
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hi um i saw the purple book and i noticed that a shark went head first. how do you findthe information massage soon by
I’m going to do this – but one question: If the vinegar eels are filtered/pasteurized out of the vinegar, where do the living vinegar eels come from? Are they likey to be in the apple itself?
Not you Rusty but to answer your question, no they do not come out of the apple they come from the water, the apple is what they feed on
You make no sense
[…] The Science of Vinegar Eels […]
This is awesome!
Rusty makes perfect sense. If I buy apple cider vinegar unfiltered & no vinegar eels present & yet way down the line become present & yet when made they were filtered out than how if all successful being filtered out regardless of days months & time did they become present.
The “eels” are interdimensional creatures who become stuck in our environment once materialized. It takes more energy than these tiny creatures have to return home. It’s a mystery how they materialize from out of nowhere,(actually somewhere & only loosely called “nowhere”).
Just read this thread again, and I see that ‘A’ was not commenting on my question, but on the nonsensical comment left by ‘Kayla’.
This article is great, but it doesn’t address where the vinegar eels come from. Vinegar doesn’t occur in nature, although I imagine fallen apples under a tree would ferment and then sour. But where do these little nematodes originate? In the soil? in the apple? carried by the ‘vinegar flies’ (a.k.a. fruit flies)?
Does anybody know where they originate? I’ve cultured them and kept them for a few years now, but all internet sources copy each other, and they all say that they originate in apple cider vinegar, which is impossible.
Hi Rusty, did you ever figure out where vinegar eels come from? Like you said all internet sources say they come from apple cider vinegar, or from apples, which are clearly a very different environment from vinegar of any type…
You said that you’ve kept them for a few years now–how did you get them? Did you follow the procedure described here, or obtain them some other way?
This is really cool even the other ones
Has anyone figured it out??? Where do they actually come from? They’ve got to materialize from somewhere. Unless… they somehow grow from the bacteria made from the apple and then grow to become the “eel”? That’s the only thing I can think of…
So has anyone tried it yet? If someone has success, i will do it.
Many nematodes can withstand extremely acid environments in the guts of snails and other animals, and evolved from terrestrial nematodes. Vinegar eels likely adapted to the acids in fermenting apples and other fruit rather than acidic guts (or went from guts of snails to fruit) (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4413787/). When vinegar eels are found in filtered vinegar, it’s because there are eggs left, which hatch (I assume pasteurization would kill the adults and eggs.)
And, yes, vinegar eels are very hardy; I recently started working in a college biology lab and found a culture that had been neglected for almost a year. There are still lots of eels in it!