THE LOWLY EARTHWORM

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 4431, 29 August 1939, Page 4

THE LOWLY EARTHWORM

| IMPORTANT PART IN WORLD AFFAIRS I ! i About a million worms inhabit the soil of this country. Few people understand what wonderful creatures they are, writes C. A. Lyon, in the ‘ Sunday i Express,’ London. I They make agriculture possible, they ; move mountains, and from our little Europe they have travelled in ships to spread all over the world, even from : Now York to the Rocky Mountains, j Charles Darwin, the great biologist, ■ had a high opinion of worms. He went j go far as to say that it was doubtful j whether any other animal had played 1 so important a part in history. | He has two ways of getting along, i In the soft topsoil he pushes the I front part of his body forward like a j wedge. Then he pushes his throat apparatus forward into the front part of I his body, causing himself to swell up i like a balloon, and thus opening up a ' way in the soil. He then thrusts his | front part forward again, and repeats, i This is the way a worm begins his bur- ' row. Painstaking trenches dug by ; biologists show that the woiym goes as ■ much as six feet down in the ground, jHe pushes himself through the earth with bristles on his underside. They ■ are so strong that he cannot be picked , up against his will without killing him, j He is quite an engineer, for this burrow you can see which looks so crude is really lined with hard, smooth “ cement he ejects from his body. A little ifciderground railway— at the end of it is a small chamber where the worm occasionally reposes rolled up ; with three or four other worms.

When he gets a good way down the worm uses his second boring method. He begins to eat the earth. He sucks it into his jmouth. He has neither teeth nor tongue nor jaws. Is it not, then, astonishing that simply by the sucking power of his lips the earthworm will work his way not only through the hardest soils, but through brick walls or even concrete?

If you were to kill a worm and open up his gizzard you would find it full of sharp stones. The worm sucks a tiny piece of hard soil into his mouth and swallows it. Within his gizzard he grinds it up between the stones as if m a mill. Dirt is his food. The soil consumed by the worm contains small living animals. It is for this, not at all out of a love of burrowing, that the worm makes his underground passages. It has been found by experiment that the worm can easily live by eating soil alone. But in practice he has a second food—leaves.

The worm spends all day under- : ground, eating soil. But at night he comes to the surface and nibbles at I leaves. He dare not come to the sur- ! face in daylight. Not because of the ■sun, but because the ultra-violet rays are fatal to him. He usually keeps the end of his tail in his burrow so as to find his way back, for ho is blind. Periodically the worm comes to the surface to eject the earth he has eaten. He makes a neat “ cast,” using his tail as a trowel. The cast the worm makes ■is of world importance. It is in simple truth the whole basis of crops. I For the earth has been mixed in ! the worm’s body with broken-up leaves. |lt has been ground to a fine paste. It I has been enriched by the acids made in- ' side the worm.

It emerges from his body as tho rich eet and most nutritious crop-growing soil. Darwin calculated on the basis of long research that every year the worms of England and Wales eat and deposit on the surface 320,000,000 tons of soil. This means that they eat the whole top soil of the country several times a century. The worm lives to a good age, even as much as five years, till an unlucky stoivn floods his burrow. He can absorb through his skin tho oxygen he needs either from air or standing water and oxygen dissolved in it. But new rainwater he can’t bear.

He makes his best speed—a foot a minute—to the surface. There he meets the daylight, which contains the ultraviolet. rays that are fatal to him. And the worm is found dead on tho garden path.