The speed, manner, and ease with which animals move depends directly on the compactness of the material and its cohesiveness. Many aquatic animals can swim through semisolid mud or muck suspensions, which lack compactness. Some lizards and snakes that live in an arid environment can swim through friable sand, which is compact but lacks strong cohesiveness. Although these swimming movements can be considered a form of fossorial locomotion, the following discussion considers only locomotor patterns in which most of the activity of the animals involved is confined to tunnels that they leave behind.
Fossorial invertebrates
Burrowing or boring invertebrates have evolved a number of different locomotor patterns to penetrate soil, wood, and stone, of which soil or mud is the easiest to penetrate. The soft-bodied invertebrates, such as worms and sea cucumbers, burrow either by peristaltic locomotion or by the contract–anchor–extend method. Their hydrostatic, or fluid, skeleton, combined with their circular and longitudinal musculature, permits controlled deformation of their shape, which allows them to squeeze into narrow spaces and then enlarge the spaces, thus creating a burrow or tunnel. Worms with a protrusible proboscis (a tubular extension of the oral region) generally burrow by the contract–anchor–extend method. Contraction of the circular muscles in the posterior half of the body drives the body fluids forward, causing the proboscis to evert (turn outward) and forcing it into the soil. When the proboscis is fully everted, the part of the body (collar) directly behind it dilates and anchors the proboscis in the soil. The entire body is then pulled forward by the longitudinal muscles and reanchored. This pattern produces the very jerky and slow forward progression typical of most fossorial locomotion.
Peristaltic locomotion, which is generated by the alternation of longitudinal- and circular-muscle-contraction waves flowing from the head to the tail, is similar to the above pattern. Forward progression is more continuous, however, because of the contraction waves. The sites of longitudinal contraction are the anchor points; body extension is by circular contraction. The pattern of movement is initiated by anchoring the anterior end. As the longitudinal contraction wave moves posteriorly, it is slowly replaced by the circular contraction wave. The anterior end slowly and forcefully elongates, driving the tip farther into the surface as the circular contraction wave moves down the body. The tip then begins to dilate and anchor the anterior end as another longitudinal contraction wave develops. This sequence is repeated, and the worm moves forward. Reversing the direction of the contraction waves enables the worm to back up.
Burrowing bivalve mollusks, such as clams, use the contract–anchor–extend locomotor mode. Such bivalves have a large muscular foot that contains longitudinal and transverse muscles as well as a hemocoel (blood cavity). The digging cycle begins with the extension of the foot by contraction of the transverse muscles. The siphons (tubular-shaped organs that carry water to and from the gills) are closed, and the adductor muscle of the shell contracts, thereby forcing blood into the tip of the foot and causing it to dilate. With the tip acting as an anchor, the longitudinal muscles then contract, pulling the body down to the anchored foot. Frequently, the longitudinal muscles contract in short steps and alternate between the left and right sides; this causes the shell to wobble and penetrate deeper as it is pulled down.
Some invertebrates are able to bore through rock. Most of the rock borers are mollusks; they bore either mechanically by scraping or chemically by the secretion of acid. The piddock, or angel’s wing, bivalves, for example, attach themselves to a rock with a sucker-like foot. The two valves, held against the rock, grind back and forth by the alternate contraction of two adductor muscles; the grinding slowly produces a tunnel.
Fossorial vertebrates
The fossorial vertebrates are found in three classes: amphibians, reptiles, and mammals. Although some fishes and birds dig or bore shallow burrows, they can hardly be considered truly fossorial, as are moles or earthworms. Locomotion of fossorial amphibians and reptiles tends to be axial; it is appendicular only in mammals. Fossorial mammals have strong forelegs with a tendency toward flattening; their hands and particularly the claws are enlarged. Forelegs show the greatest modification in such species as moles and gophers, whose entire lives are spent in burrows. These animals tend to dig with a breast stroke, either synchronously or alternately, by extending the foreleg straight forward in front of the snout and then retracting it in a lateral arc. The loosened soil is compacted against the side walls of the burrow. In those fossorial species that dig burrows as nests but forage above the ground—many rodents, such as prairie-dogs, ground squirrels, and groundhogs—the digging movements tend to be dorsoventral with alternating limb movement. The forelegs are extended forward and then retracted downward and backward; the loosened soil passes beneath the body and is frequently pushed to the surface.
Fossorial reptiles and amphibians are usually legless, or the legs are so reduced that they serve no locomotor function; in most species, the head is flattened dorsoventrally, and the snout extends beyond and somewhat over the mouth. Burrowing is accomplished by one of three patterns analogous to the contract–anchor–extend locomotion of invertebrates. In the most common of these, the snout is driven straight forward along the bottom of the tunnel, the head is then raised, and the soil is compacted to the roof. The head tends to be laterally compressed in animals that use the other two patterns. In one of these patterns, the snout is shoved forward and then swung from side to side; in the other, the snout is rotated as it swings from side to side and seems to shave the walls of the tunnel.