Worms in herds?
June 7th 2010 05:35
Back in 2007, when my wife and I were in the UK for an extended holiday, we visited a worm farm. This wasn't your tinpot tiddly worm farm - this was a worm farm with thousands upon thousands of worms. The reason we went was because at that stage not having any idea whether I'd get a job when I returned to NZ, we were considering the possibility of running a worm farm.
Fortunately I got a job, because running a worm farm is a major undertaking.
While the worms do a good deal of the work, the farmers have to collect the worms by hand when they're selling them off, and have to do a great deal of mucking about with horse manure and soils, and various other heavy duty tasks. (The worm beds were all on the ground at this place, which meant having to kneel to collect the worms. Tough on the knees, I'd think.)
In the last couple of years we've been more involved with our garden, however, and one of the things we bought this year was a worm farm. It's about a metre high, and perhaps 600 mm in diameter. The worms mostly inhabit the middle section where they still live amongst the stuff they came in, but they also make regular and productive trips to the next level up, where they chew up the vegetable offcuts and various other items that we feed them on. In due course they're supposed to so fill up their normal level that they have to migrate completely to the upper level - at which point we add a third level (still sitting waiting in the shed). However they haven't got to that point yet.
All this by way of a very long introduction to an article that appeared in the BBC Earth News which stated that: earthworms use touch to communicate and influence each other's behaviour...By doing so the worms collectively decide to travel in the same direction as part of a single herd.
This is intriguing. Like many such studies I take it with a grain of salt, since it often seems - at least when you read the reports of the research done - that the conclusions drawn from what's been seen could be interpreted in more than one way.
We know that worms use touch to communicate, since they increase as fast as rabbits. And they have the advantage of being able to play Mr or Mrs as they please. A convenience that humans fortunately don't have, otherwise the human race would be in even more of a mess than it already is.
Can you imagine some teenage boy in need of acne cleanser debating when he meets up with a young lady whether he's going to be a he in this relationship or a she? And vice versa. It's all too complicated for words. Pretty much like human behaviour in general.
To get back to worms, since that might be a safer subject, I'm not sure that telling us, as the article does, that worms like to form clusters, is any great news. Anyone who's ever dug through a worm-infested compost will quickly discover that worms form groups. Whether we could truly call these 'herds' as the researchers do is another question.
However, anything I find on the Net or in the news about worms is always of interest. They're one of the most intriguing creatures on the planet: much underrated, and capable of a workload that would incapacitate that average human in a couple of weeks.
Incidentally, what do you call it when worms take over the world? Global Worming. [The photo is by 'Annie&John' from flickr.com]
Fortunately I got a job, because running a worm farm is a major undertaking.
In the last couple of years we've been more involved with our garden, however, and one of the things we bought this year was a worm farm. It's about a metre high, and perhaps 600 mm in diameter. The worms mostly inhabit the middle section where they still live amongst the stuff they came in, but they also make regular and productive trips to the next level up, where they chew up the vegetable offcuts and various other items that we feed them on. In due course they're supposed to so fill up their normal level that they have to migrate completely to the upper level - at which point we add a third level (still sitting waiting in the shed). However they haven't got to that point yet.
All this by way of a very long introduction to an article that appeared in the BBC Earth News which stated that: earthworms use touch to communicate and influence each other's behaviour...By doing so the worms collectively decide to travel in the same direction as part of a single herd.
This is intriguing. Like many such studies I take it with a grain of salt, since it often seems - at least when you read the reports of the research done - that the conclusions drawn from what's been seen could be interpreted in more than one way.
We know that worms use touch to communicate, since they increase as fast as rabbits. And they have the advantage of being able to play Mr or Mrs as they please. A convenience that humans fortunately don't have, otherwise the human race would be in even more of a mess than it already is.
Can you imagine some teenage boy in need of acne cleanser debating when he meets up with a young lady whether he's going to be a he in this relationship or a she? And vice versa. It's all too complicated for words. Pretty much like human behaviour in general.
To get back to worms, since that might be a safer subject, I'm not sure that telling us, as the article does, that worms like to form clusters, is any great news. Anyone who's ever dug through a worm-infested compost will quickly discover that worms form groups. Whether we could truly call these 'herds' as the researchers do is another question.
However, anything I find on the Net or in the news about worms is always of interest. They're one of the most intriguing creatures on the planet: much underrated, and capable of a workload that would incapacitate that average human in a couple of weeks.
Incidentally, what do you call it when worms take over the world? Global Worming. [The photo is by 'Annie&John' from flickr.com]
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