No earthworms, no radishes.
Of all the beasties that walk and crawl on the face of the planet, earthworms may be my favourite.
Among nature’s great recyclers, each year earthworms munch through up to 20 tonnes of organic matter on each hectare of land, then squeeze the digested remnants out their tiny butts as food that plants can use.
If that’s not one hell of a public service, I don’t know what is.
Right now, a few thousand tiger worms - close relations to earthworms - are chowing down on kitchen scraps in the worm farm that a neighbour kindly gifted me the other day. In return for the castoffs I’m providing, they’re giving me their vermicast - a nice word for worm poo - which is reputed to have almost magical affects on any soil it touches.
My plan is to scale up. Worms ask nothing more than a decent amount of food to turn into raging fornicators that multiply at a rate to make a Fields Medal winner’s head spin. And one thing we have plenty of on our three-acre farmlet is food for worms. Before long, if my cunning plan comes to fruition, we’ll be harvesting juicy, crisp radishes the size of baseballs growing in six-inches of wondrous worm do.
I’ll keep you posted on progress.
Worm comes Old English wurm or wyrm. The word’s history can be traced back even further, through Proto-Germanic and then back to Proto-Indo-European wrmi, from the root wer- (to turn or bend).
What our Old English ancestors meant by wurm was a far broader category than you and I think of. For them it included serpents, snakes, dragons, scorpions, maggots and reptiles as well as the causes of certain diseases. My only disappointment is that antiquity hasn’t blessed us with one or two stories of a brave knight heading off over the hills to rescue a damsel from the clutches of a fierce, fire-breathing worm.
Although our ancestors may have lumped more critters into the worm category than us, the number of worm species we know of today far outweighs anything they could have dreamt of.
You’ve got your Platyhelminthes, which includes flatworms, tapeworms, and flukes - a line up designed to mess with human health on a grand scale. Among their features is the lack of an anus, which means they regurgitate undigested material through the mouth, making them very unpopular dinner guests. Before modern plumbing, almost everyone had worms of this type, of which there are about 13,000 species.
Then you’ve got your Nematoda, a class of possibly many millions of worm species, which includes threadworms, roundworms, and hookworms. By one estimate, for every human on the planet there are 65 billion nematodes. Mull that over for a while and see how well you sleep tonight.
The next group is your segmented worms, called Annelida - thought to hold 9000 or so species. This is the group to which our beloved earthworm belongs, making it the finest of the major groupings by a country mile.
The final class of worms is of more recent origin. A computer worm is a piece of malware that replicates itself not so that its offspring can provide food for deserving plants, but for the low purpose of merely spreading to other computers. Worm in this sense was the creation of John Brunner, who used it in his 1975 novel The Shockwave Rider. Unlike computer viruses, worms tend not to do damage to the computers they invade. Rather, they just chew up bandwidth, slowing everything down at head office and depriving managers of a valid reason for yelling at their people for not getting enough done.
One Platyhelminthe which has played a part in my life is Echinococcus, found in sheep and other farm animals. Cystic echinococcosis, more commonly known as hydatids, is a horrific human disease caused by this tapeworm, which can be ingested by eating meat from a diseased animal. It typically causes cysts to grow in the liver and other organs and, left untreated, can be life threatening.
Dogs, an otherwise wonderful species, are slobs in the eating department and will hoover up any rotting meat they find lying around. What’s more, at one time in New Zealand it was common for farmers to feed them the offal of recently slaughtered sheep. That made them a serious vector for Echinococcus. I remember taking our farm dogs every so often to a government-sponsored “dosing strip” - really just a marked out piece of land on the side of the road - where they’d be fed a pill that prompted them to defecate. The resulting stool would be then tested for the presence of the tapeworm or its eggs.
In a rare example of farmers and government playing nice with each other, hydatids was effectively eradicated from New Zealand early this millennium. That makes us one of the few countries to have achieved this feat, a fact I am clinging to grimly in light of recent All Blacks performances, the usual source of national pride for sad bastards like me.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a few thousand worms that urgently need sustenance. It’s a full moon tonight and, if I’m not mistaken, Annelida love is in the air.
Bits and specious
When he wasn’t formulating arguably the greatest theory ever, Charles Darwin spent much of his time studying earthworms. In 1881 he published a book snazzily titled The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, with Observations of their Habits. It actually sold faster in its first year than On the Origin of Species had.
On your typical farm with livestock, the weight of the worms beneath the surface will likely be greater than that of the animals above ground.
Does this mean your local beef farmer is actually a worm farmer?
Quote of the week
I think we consider too much the luck of the early bird and not enough the bad luck of the early worm.
Franklin D. Roosevelt