As a guest scientist for an expedition in Alaska, biologist Dan Shain needed a gob of fresh worms for daily broadcasts to middle school students around the world.

So, shovel in hand, Shain studied the hard, scalloped surface of the ice field near Portage Lake for any furtive wriggle. Then he began chipping out the Styrofoam-stiff snow.

"Any place is as good as another," Shain told two helpers equipped with ice axes, a post hole digger and a plastic bowl for specimens. "We're standing on about 10 million worms."

But after excavating several pits and a 12-foot-deep hole over five hours last week, Shain found no sign of wintering worms. He would have to come back.

"We could collect 1,000 in 10 minutes in the summer," Shain said as he packed up. "Where can they be?"

Somewhere underfoot, beneath tons of snow and rubble in this narrow valley, lay the winter haunt of what could be Alaska's most unusual animal, Mesenchytraeus solifugus, the "sun-avoiding" ice worm.

In theory, those creatures ought to be subsisting on the glacier's buried summer surface, insulated from winter's deadly cold while feasting on leftover algae and waiting for spring melt.

In practice, no one knows. Ice worms, threadlike annelids that live on certain coastal glaciers between south central Alaska and Washington, have never been collected in winter.

Shain, an assistant professor from Rutgers University who has been investigating the creatures for years, had to find some. He arrived in Alaska last week to find only a few worms still alive on ice in the back room of the Begich, Boggs Visitor Center in Portage.

"The refrigerator seems to have had some difficulties," he said.

In just a few days, Shain and the students and teachers would go live on the Internet and television as they answered worm questions from across the country and performed experiments on how worms react to light, heat, earth, chemicals and gravity.

Though aimed at inspiring young scientists, the ice worm research has extraordinary implications. The answers could shed insight into extraterrestrial life in the frozen ocean on Jupiter's moon Europa, or how physicians might preserve organs for transplant, or even suggest a secret to suspended animation for space travel, according to Shain.

"If we're ever going to travel through space to other galaxies, our life span isn't long enough," Shain said in a written description about his Jason role. "By the time we'd get there, we'd be dead. But if we understood the ice worm's physiological tricks, we could super-cool ourselves."

Shain has been pursuing the enigmatic worm since the early 1990s, when he saw one described on a restaurant place mat during a trip through Alaska. During summer 2000, he spent two months collecting specimens for laboratory studies in New Jersey. Last fall, he and three co-authors published their findings in the Canadian Journal of Zoology.

The biggest mystery has to do with how ice worms can exist at all.

They surface at dusk and then retreat straight down at dawn. As they use tiny bristles called setae to travel across the glacial surface in pursuit of algae, the worms remain chilled to the freezing point of water, a temperature at which most other life basically stops. Ice worms turn to mush above about 40 degrees Fahrenheit and freeze solid as Popsicles at about 20 degrees.

According to Shain, this adaptation presents a fundamental biochemical problem. How can ice worm metabolism rev up at the very temperatures at which other creatures start to shut down?

He believes the worms have evolved a unique way of storing and producing energy on a cellular level. He and his students at Rutgers have begun trying to isolate the gene responsible.

"We have evidence that there's a major change in this critical enzyme that makes fuel," he said. "It's one major step to make them survive. The other (adaptations) make them thrive."