IMBY (in my backyard)

Great marketing idea:  "Part book tour diary, part earthworm love story" reads the subhead of Amy Stewart's blog, Worms of Endearment.  The book is The Earth Moved:  On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms. We just stumbled into the blog and were smitten with the writing and subject matter. As an amateur naturalist who cultivated a Worm Garden in a cigar box at age 8, we were drop-jawed to read what she says about the former residents of that cigar box:

In response to comments over the last few days about that non-native worm, the nightcrawler Lumbricus terrestris:  That’s right, some of the most common species of worms that you might turn up in your back yard or at a bait stand are actually non-native.  There are plenty of native worms in the United States, but many of them have been displaced by farming and the building of roads and cities.  The European worms like the nightcrawler (which probably followed European settlers in potted plants, ship ballast, horses’ hooves, etc.) found our soil to their liking and proliferated.  We continue to help the spread of these worms today by, for instance, taking them into the wilderness as fish bait.

"For the most part," writes Stewart, "European worms are good for the soil and a friend to the farmer.  However, anytime a native species is displaced and a non-native one takes its place, one wonders about the consequences.  The Minnesota story is a perfect example":

Worms are damp creatures and the parts of the world that were under ice during the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago, like Minnesota, do not tend to have native worm populations.  The forests in Minnesota evolved without worms, which means that the forest floor is covered with a deliciously spongy duff layer of slowly rotting leaves.  That duff layer is crucial to the germination of young trees and tender understory plants. 

But now European worms—my beloved nightcrawlers and red wigglers, among others—have moved in to the forest, thanks to the spreading of sod on nearby golf courses, the trucking in of fill, the dumping of fishing bait on the shores of lakes, and the simple fact that a worm cocoon can get lodged in an ATV tire or the sole of a hiking boot.  These worms can, and do, consume the entire leaf fall of a forest in a single season.  That spongy duff layer is gone, and with it, many of the fragile understory plants and tree seedlings that depended on it for germination.

[via Bookish Gardener via Whomping Willow]

Comments

[Amy Stewart]

A cigar box? I love it! When I go on the road with the worms, I keep them in Tupperware, but somehow a cigar box just feels more...cozy. Not as secure, perhaps, and this is an important consideration when we are traveling by plane.

[Sissy Willis]

In those days, there was no such thing as Tupperware...Cigar boxes were the great containers of all things collectible. We're talking the fifties here...Before that, it was Wardian Cases: http://www.plantexplorers.com/Explorers/Wardian_Age.htm

[humidors]

Cigar boxes are called humidors...so in fact you have worms in your humidors. That sounds like something that a cigar smoker would say when he finds the bugs in the humidors that eat the cigars. Scary saying that to a cigar smoker with humidors full of cigars.

[Sissy Willis]

You make me LOL, humidors.