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THE GREAT OUTDOORS
MENTAL HEALTH Real Can of Worms
URGENT CARE
Non-native earthworms threaten forest health.
Get the help you need when you
need it! Mental Health Urgent Care NATURE AROUND US J. Morton Galetto, CU Maurice River
provides adults immediate access to
services in a welcoming environment. ne might say I opened a can of
worms when I promised to embark
Oon a story about earthworms in
North America. My discussion in last week’s
Get Help Today! story of the eastern mole who can eat its
weight in worms daily prompted this topic.
The mole also bites the worms’ heads off,
rendering them immobile, in order to cache
its quarry in an underground storage cham-
ber to consume at a later time. More than
400 headless worms have been discovered
in these chambers in some instances.
So if you grew up learning that earth-
worms were the cat’s meow and moles
were a neighborhood pest, prepare to have Try to avoid introducing non-native worms
your bubble burst. Like mute swans, night
1420 Lincoln Ave. | Vineland, NJ 08361 into forested areas. Don’t transplant garden
crawlers are exotic invasive species and plants into forested areas and when using
856-537-2310 | www.oaksintcare.org
ecologists are not fond of either. And with nightcrawlers as bait be careful not to re-
good reason. lease them into the wild.
I was naïve to the exotic earthworm
invasion of North America until a trip to earthworms north of the glacial bound-
Minnesota in 2018. There is actually an ary are undoubtedly exotic. Soil scientists
organization called Great Lakes Worm hypothesize that native species were
Watch that is educating people about taking extirpated during the glacial period. The
care not to introduce earthworms because glaciers’ southern boundary was in central
they change the ecology of an environment. New Jersey and the sands of the coastal
Experts in soil biology and farming gen- plain where we live in southern New
erally speak of worms in glowing terms. Jersey are the scourings of the glacial front.
Conversely, forest biologists describe inva- Most of the worms we are familiar with in
sive worms as destroying the rich carpet our gardens—primarily night crawlers, or
of organic matter on the forest floor of the Lumbricus terrestris—were never found nat-
Northeastern United States. They have urally in North America. They are invasive
drastically changed the soil by consuming species, introduced by European settlers.
the leaf litter and leaf mold that native oaks Farmers and the U.S. Department of
and forest plants need. Earthworms accel- Agriculture actively dispense information
erate the decomposition that would nor- about the virtues of earthworms in the
mally be accomplished much more slowly agriculture system because their burrowing
by fungi and bacteria; these create a duff creates holes that accelerate the movement
layer important to new growth and spring of water in soils and help with aeration
flowers, and it is an essential blanket in cold and decompaction of soils. They are major
weather. decomposers of organic matter, deriving
Worse yet, the compositional changes nutrition from fungi and bacteria present
caused by worms support invasive plants, on the leaf litter. However forest ecologists
allowing them in many cases to outcom- have a very different view of our wiggly
pete natives. Prairie ecologists explain that subterranean denizens.
since the 1850s Euro-American settlers Peter M. Groffman, a senior scientist
have imported trees and earthworms not at the Institute of Ecosystem Studies,
native to North America, thus changing the Millbrook, NY, explained to Ira Flatow on
makeup of forest and prairie soils. National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation,
In the Northeastern United States any “Sometimes we might find actually more
