29 February 04

The Unknown Worms

I just read The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms, a new book by Amy Stewart. The author is a gardener who got entranced by earthworms and wrote this account of their natural history. Oligochaetology, as the study of earthworms is known, starts off with Darwin’s last book, written in 1881,The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms, With Observations on Their Habits. The field, however, remains tiny, making ornithology look like the path to riches. I am amazed, but at some level am not surprised, by how little we know about the systematics and biogeography of earthworms. The field is reminiscent of 19th-century natural history: of the several earthworm systematists in North America, most don’t make their living as biologists. One is a computer tech, and another is a truck driver manager. There are probably a half-dozen new species to be discovered in California alone, but who will ever do the needed surveys?

But we like worms anyway. Pica regularly rescues them in rainy weather, and the author, who has been tending several thousand worms for the past seven years, feels there isn’t a finer pet anywhere. Or to quote Darwin: “It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organized creatures.”

Posted by at 09:28 PM in Nature and Place | Link |
  1. It’s funny, back when i was a fanatical gardener, I loved worms. Now I’m a forest activist, I’m considerably less fond of them because they are actually an invasive species here in central PA and all points north. the glaciers and associated cold up to a couple hundred miles south of the Wisconsin ice sheet wiped ‘em out, it seems, so the forest ecosystems we have now evolved without them. So what? Well, worms consume a LOT of forest litter, especially nightcrawlers. Humus in an eastern forest should be 6-15 inches; worms can reduce it to a mere coating (basically just last year’s leaves) in a few years after introduction. This has repercussions throughout the food web as you can imagine. (You probably knew all that from reading the book, but i figured some of your readers might be interested.)

    — Dave    2. March 2004, 14:15    Link
  2. There is a famous oligochaetologist (phew I got it right!) here in Japan who is actively trying to promote people keeping human tape worms inside themselves. He himself has three of them that have been living inside him for more than ten years. He maintains that tape worms developed in harmony with human history and that it is unnatural for us not to carry them inside ourselves, also maintaining that one reason we are all so overweight these days is the lack of proper internal parasites to keep the calories down.

    Hmmm… anyone for Tape Worm Delight?

    — butuki    6. March 2004, 02:36    Link
  3. Pica,
    Do you still have the poem you wrote some years ago about worms??? Its worth digging out, for sure!
    Ciao
    Lindy Loo

    — tattler    7. March 2004, 13:55    Link

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