A worm is as good a traveler as a grasshopper or a cricket, and a much wiser settler. With all their activity these do not hop away from drought nor forward to summer. We do not avoid evil by fleeing before it, but by rising above or diving below its plane; as the worm escapes drought and frost by boring a few inches deeper.
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 1849
WHEN I BROUGHT my first batch of earthworms home and introduced them to the worm bin, I could hardly wait to get to know them, to become familiar with their habits, their likes and dislikes. The thought of hundreds of earthworms in a bin on my porch proved to be an irresistible attraction. I knew I should leave them alone for a few days so they could get settled—the instructions that came with the bin were quite explicit on this point. Earthworms, through their digestion, help create the kind of microbial community that they prefer. The organisms in their castings flourish and multiply until the balance of bacteria, protozoa, and fungi is just right. A responsible earthworm farmer will leave a new group of worms in peace for weeks while they adapt to their new home.
My bin came with a brick of compressed shredded coconut fiber, which expands once it has sat in a bucket of water for an hour or so. It loosens into a damp shaggy mass, losing its brick shape and taking on the consistency of peat moss. This is considered the ideal bedding for a new small-scale worm bin; it gives the worms something dark and damp to bury themselves in. They will eventually eat it. After that they will live in their own castings and won’t require any special bedding.
I should have left them undisturbed in this bedding for a week or more, but I just couldn’t, not even for an hour or a day. I was too curious about what they were doing in the dark, damp confines of their new home. I wasn’t supposed to feed them right away—they needed a few days to get settled in before they were ready to eat—but I dropped a banana skin in the bin anyway. Several times a day I would steal out to the porch, lift the lid, and churn through the bedding with a garden fork. The worms were limp, puny things that lacked the wherewithal to duck away from the light. They needed to fatten up, start laying eggs, explore the boundaries of their new world. I’d have to stop torturing them with the garden fork if I ever wanted to establish a successful colony. Looking back on those early days and the unrelenting, even cruel, nature of my own curiosity, I realize that perhaps it is best that we do not dig too enthusiastically in search of undiscovered species of worms. Our investigation of them could, in the end, be their undoing.
I should probably leave the worms in my own garden undisturbed, but I can’t resist. I own a pocket loupe, a magnifying glass about the size of a quarter that retracts into a metal case. Garden supply companies sell pocket loupes to allow gardeners like me to peer closely at spots on leaves, tiny insects, and near-invisible seeds that are too difficult to handle and space evenly without some magnification. I carry mine with me when I’m in the garden and I use it to look at the worms I turn up in the soil. But even a tenfold magnification isn’t enough for me to see all the fine details on a worm’s body, and after all the time I’ve spent studying its anatomy, it has not gotten much easier for me to tell different species of worms apart.
Anytime I find a worm in my garden, I turn it over, looking for pores and bristles. I try to count the number of segments between its head and its clitellum (which is another way of distinguishing between species), but the worm stretches and twists and arches away from me, and I lose count. I hold it in one hand and stroke it with the other, trying to mesmerize it, but that leaves me without a hand to hold the loupe. Eventually I give up and drop the worm back into the soil, uncertain of what I’ve seen. Now that I’m in the habit of picking up worms and studying them up close, I have started to have a recurring dream of magnified worms that appear to be almost a foot long and as big around as my thumb, with rubbery red hairs protruding along every segment. They look like the sort of creatures you might pull up in a fishing net and toss quickly back into the ocean before you even have time to wonder what it was. Even in the dream I turn away from them, as if I’ve seen something I shouldn’t have.
GIANT WORMS AREN’T just a creation of my dreams. There are a few species of giant worms around the world, but I’ll probably never see one. I’ll certainly never encounter one in my backyard, where the building of homes and roads, the digging of a well, and the constant traffic of humans long ago would have driven any away. And I’m not likely to see one in a zoo. A giant worm wouldn’t survive long in captivity, and although a few have been rounded up and put in glass cages, they are nearing extinction now and will no longer be taken from the wilderness for our entertainment.
There are some giant worms up the road from here, in Oregon and Washington State. Native to prairie grassland, they are increasingly rare due to the spread of cities. Even agriculture pushes out fragile native worms that are best adapted to undisturbed soil. Perhaps one of the most unusual worms at risk of extinction is the giant, flower-scented worm that lives in the Palouse region of southeastern Washington State, an area better known for its gentle rolling hills, spectacular rivers and waterfalls, and rich agricultural land. (Locals boast that it is one of the richest wheat-growing regions anywhere, not to mention the lentil-growing capital of the world.)
Few people know that Palouse is also home to the giant Palouse earthworm, Driloleirus americanus. Or perhaps I should say that it used to be home to the giant worm. Not one sighting has been reported in over twenty years, and earthworm researchers are pretty confident that if one was found, it would be reported to the local university and might even make the evening news. These worms are pinkish white, reach two feet or longer when fully extended, and are covered with tiny setae that they use for locomotion. They excrete a milky white fluid, the coelomic mucus, that smells like flowers—lilies, to be exact.
The giant Palouse earthworm has been spotted only a few times in the last century. A researcher named Frank Smith found one in 1897, decided it must be a relative of Megascolides australis, the legendary Australian worm, and named it Megascolides americanus in its honor. It was renamed Driloleirus americanus once it became clear that the Palouse worm and the Australian worm had little in common apart from their size—and even there, the Australian type was quite a bit longer than the Palouse worm.
A few more Palouse worms were seen in the thirties and again in the seventies and eighties. Recently, expeditions to unearth the giant worm have turned up nothing but a few European species. Washington State University even recruited a group of schoolchildren to head to a deserted spot outside of town where it might be found. A day of digging turned up plenty of European worms, but no one caught a glimpse of the giant Palouse worm.
These giant worms attract a small but enthusiastic group of supporters. Another Pacific Northwest worm, the giant Oregon worm Driloleirus macelfreshi, has disappeared as quickly as its Palouse cousin, but not before a family of earthworm scientists managed to name the species and even capture and preserve a few specimens.
Dorothy McKey-Fender, an oligochaetologist, and her husband discovered and identified the giant Oregon worm. Now eighty-five years old, she recalled the days that she and her late husband, Kenneth, spent outdoors looking for the legendary worm.
“We’d just take the kids with us,” she told me. “That’s what we did on the weekends. I was always interested in bugs myself as a child. I knew my kids would enjoy it, too, and my son, William, really stuck with it. He still helps me with my work.”
That work includes curating a collection of preserved worms collected over a lifetime. McKey-Fender has worms collected as far back as 1929 among the jars and bottles in the laboratory behind her house. In addition to a few specimens of the giant Oregon worm, she has about eighty species that are still undescribed. As she works her way through the collection, categorizing and describing the native Oregon worms, she publishes her findings in earthworm journals like Reynolds’s Megadrilogica. “So much work remains to be done,” she said. “I have a lot of it well on its way, but I’m no spring chicken.”
Her son, William, has taken up the cause, responding to a request a couple years ago by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to go looking for the giant worm one last time. Although other native species turned up, not a single giant Oregon worm was found, even when Fender searched the areas where he’d seen it before. He told a Portland newspaper, “I think we lost this one. I think if there are some left, they won’t be around very long.”
Still, his mother has vivid memories of the times in the 1980s when she and her husband encountered the two-foot-long white worms. Kenneth once grabbed one, and it wriggled and contracted, using every one of its tiny white hairs to hold itself in its burrow. When it had had enough of being handled, it ejected a good-sized spray of lily-scented coelomic fluid in her direction.
“It was quite an experience,” she told a newspaper reporter. In spite of their reputation for squirting liquid when stressed, she remembers a story of a child managing to get ahold of one and swinging it around his head, stretching it (temporarily) to three feet. “It’ll do that,” she said knowingly.
Sightings of the great white worm are rare in part because they surface only during wet weather and they frequently burrow up to fifteen feet below ground. “When you start to dig,” she told me, “they sound. They go down even deeper. Some people use chemicals to get the worms to surface, but we don’t do that. We just dig. Sometimes you can shake a post that’s stuck in the ground and the vibrations will get the worms to surface, but not these. They don’t respond to that.”
Most people have never seen the giant Oregon earthworm and would just as soon keep it that way. I asked Dorothy why anyone should care that this worm is nearing extinction. Does it have an extraordinary ability to improve the soil? Does it have a special relationship with any particular plant? She reminded me that given the worm’s near-extinction, it is impossible to know. But besides that, she said, “Humans are curious. Humans want to know. We wouldn’t be the creatures we are if we didn’t. We’ve got a unique fauna of worms here in the Pacific Northwest, and they are incompletely known. I’m interested in the whole picture. I want to know what’s out there.” Like any good ecologist, she wonders about the connections between the earthworms and the soil they live in, the forests and prairies they support, the birds or mammals that may have once sought them out for food. Anytime a thread is broken, the web changes forever.
ONE OF THE LARGEST worms in the world is the giant, three-foot Gippsland earthworm, Megascolides australis, well known among residents of southeastern Victoria, not far from Melbourne, Australia. Although few people have seen the worm in its natural environment, many have heard a deep gurgling sound from underground, the sound the worm makes when it is disturbed and ducks for cover in deep burrows, sliding through tunnels lined with its own coelomic fluid. Farmers in the Bass River valley may complain that the local conservation movement has gone overboard when it tries to protect its habitat and places the needs of worms over those of people, but just as many will brag about the number of giant worms on their property. Over the last several years, the town of Korumburra has even hosted a worm festival called Karmai, the aboriginal word for giant worm, and crowned an earthworm queen. (Sadly, the festival has been canceled after twenty years in operation.) In spite of all the talk about giant worms in the region, tourists driving along the Bass Highway are often startled to see a three-hundred-foot worm along the side of the road. It is the Giant Worm Museum, the world’s only annelid-oriented tourist attraction.
The owner, John Matthews, hadn’t taken the slightest interest in worms before the night in 1981 when the subject of the giant worm came up at dinner. The worm had been named back in 1878, and news of its legendary size had even made its way to Charles Darwin while he was completing The Formation of Vegetable Mould. Since then, other species around the world were often named after Megascolides australis, but in fact, the Australian worm is unique not only in its size, but also in its physiology.
The adults grow over three feet long, although they easily stretch to ten feet. It is almost impossible to handle one of them —their skin is so fragile that it may burst while the worm tries to get away—but a few pictures still exist of people holding one up, three pairs of hands supporting its long pink body. (Imagine three men holding a ten-foot-long hot dog and you’ve got the picture.) The cocoons incubate for over a year and when the young worms emerge, they are about two inches long. Although it is impossible to tag them and track their life span, the best guess is that they take up to five years to reach maturity and live twenty to thirty years. It is known for certain that they can survive ten years in captivity. Unlike many worms that heal quickly after a cut and regrow lost segments, the giant Gippsland worm is quite vulnerable to injury. Cut one of these worms and it can bleed to death.
Matthews was intrigued when he heard about them. At the time he owned a hotel and restaurant on Phillips Island, in the Gippsland region, an area already known for the parade of penguins that walk across the beach at sunset. He was interested in opening a tourist attraction. At talks he gave to members of the tourism industry, the subject of the worm often came up. Surely, he figured, this worm was a rarity even among Australia’s many natural wonders. The region was already a popular tourist destination—visitors had been flocking to the penguin colony on Phillips Island since the 1920s, and a conservatory allowed visitors to see koalas in their natural habitat—so an attraction centered around the unusual underground dweller seemed like a natural next step.
“We instigated a little research at the university,” he said. “There wasn’t much data about the worms at first. And we did manage to dig one or two up.” When the museum first opened in 1985, only a few live specimens were put on display. A special exhibit even allowed visitors to handle them. “We quickly realized that the worms couldn’t tolerate that,” he said. “Besides, we couldn’t just go dig up more anytime we wanted. Once the museum was built, we drew attention to the fact that their habitat was disappearing. That’s when they went on the endangered list.” Now visitors have to content themselves with a glass exhibit case in which one or two build deep burrows. There’s also a movie theater and eighteen other worm-related exhibits. Because worms are not likely to breed in captivity, it is only a matter of time before visitors won’t be able to see a live giant Gippsland worm at all. To hold the public’s interest, the museum has recently branched out to include exhibits on koalas, dingos, emus, and other wildlife.
About the museum’s architecture, John Matthews told me, “I wanted the entire museum to be in the shape of an actual worm, but it proved too difficult. With so many people coming through, we would have had to build doors and windows along the length of the worm and then it just wouldn’t look like a worm anymore. So most of the exhibits are in the building behind the worm structure that you see from the highway. But there is one exhibit inside the worm itself. It’s built to look like the inside of a worm body. It’s quite realistic. We even recorded sounds of them eating. And we’ve got worm tunnels you can crawl through to give you an idea of what it’s like—you know—what it’s like to be a worm.”
NO ONE KNOWS how many of these giant worms still live in the fields and river banks of south and west Gippsland. Our very curiosity could be fatal; there is no way to count them without harming them. The giant Australian earthworm lives its entire life belowground in a deep network of tunnels. It deposits its casts where they cannot be seen or measured. Its cocoons hatch underground. It finds its food source among the roots of plants. If it rises to the top of the soil, poking its head out of a burrow to observe the unfamiliar life on the surface of the planet, it is a rare occasion, perhaps not much more than an accident or a wrong turn.
The soil’s pressure belowground is tremendous. Pressure increases by 7,300 pounds per square inch for every mile you travel below the earth’s surface. It seems improbable that a creature as fragile as the Gippsland earthworm could survive under any pressure at all, but it does. I can’t imagine how it digs a chamber for itself underground, a labyrinth of burrows that may extend far below the reach of tree roots, entirely out of our grasp.
When I stand at the edge of a forest, at the base of a mountain, or in my own backyard, looking down at the soil, I feel the way I do when I look out at the ocean, where great blue whales and giant squid swim the unknown depths, where sharks hunt and sea cucumbers wave with the currents. Any sea creature, at any time, can break the surface of the ocean, can rise up from the hidden underwater world and fix one dark eye upon you, then dive down again. The ground has its own kind of fluidity, its own hidden world, its own mysterious inhabitants. What creature, I wonder, would rise up from the surface of the earth if I stood here long enough and watched? How much of the underground world of the giant earthworm is still unexplored and unknown?