The Earth Moved...

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The Earth Moved:

On the Remarkable

Achievements

of Earthworms

by Amy Stewart

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2004

 

Talk about your invasive species. According to Stewart, many of the earthworms commonly found in North America and northern Europe are wormy-come-latelies, having wriggled their way into our gardens, or what would become our gardens, sometime after the Pleistocene ice melted. Native species living at the glaciers’ southern boundaries had little luck competing and are now hard to find.

 

It turns out the common nightcrawler, a sure sign of Spring and the stuff of robins’ dreams, followed European immigrants to the New World hidden “in the soil of potted plants, the ballast of ships, the hooves of horses, and the wheels of wagons.” In the space of a mere 200 years, they crossed the continent, “a feat that would have taken worms about 1.5 million years to accomplish by themselves had they simply been released on the East Coast and allowed to migrate towards California at their leisurely rate of few yards per year.”

So much for the tortoise and the hare. The worm wins!

Like honeybees, another European import, worms helped transform the frontier landscape, but in ways so subtle, if significant, they’re rarely mentioned.

 

And like Darwin, who wrote a whole treatise on worms -- “The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms, With Observations of the Their Habitats,” Stewart is so besotted with her subject, you find yourself falling for them, too.

 

Earthworms, we learn, were present in unusually high numbers near the Nile, Indus and Euphrates river valleys, which certainly contributed to the unusually high fertility of those areas, which in turn set the stage for the great civilizations that developed. 

There, then, but for the grace of worms… 

- j.a.g.