By NANCY JANE KERN
LAST WEEK I found my first earthworm and started remembering the importance of these common creatures. As a child, they were prized as bait for fishing. I fished so much that one of my nicknames was “fish cake.” I fished for trout in our streams and bluegills, largemouth bass, and pickerel in the farm ponds, and often had several cats following me in hopes of a good meal. In later years we stocked a pond with rainbow trout which was heaven.
We don’t like to think about it, but those earthworms work their way up through the food web to us via more than fish. We had free-range chickens and earthworms were on their menu too. They helped fatten our chickens, made them healthy and we ate hen and duck eggs almost every day. Our pigs rooted them out and munched them up too. In an acre of soil, there can be as many as 8 million worms.
When I followed my father’s plow, it seemed like there were this many worms in the newly turned furrows. The big ones went into a can for the next fishing trip. In the rich manure-soaked grassy edges of the damp barnyard, we found even more and bigger earthworms. These were the easy spots to dig for bait. No matter how many we removed there were always plenty in there for the next time.
The earthworms are an indicator that the soil is good and not contaminated. If the worms are alive and well what grows in this soil will be good too. If cattle eat grass and grain grown in worm-rich soil their milk and meat should be good for us. Earthworms are constantly burrowing through the soil and feeding on vegetation in the dirt. Their burrows aerate the soil, and the worms produce casts that are their waste materials. The casts contain nitrogen and other things that enrich the soil. The burrows also loosen the soil and allow it to hold more water. There are about 7,000 species of earthworms in the world (class Oligochaeta which are hermaphrodites) and they are considered one of the most important animals for the earth’s overall health.
Some golf courses consider earthworms to be pests because they attract moles that eat them, plus their castings at the surface may disrupt areas like putting greens. The benefits of these worms by far outweigh their relatively minor negatives. Greens can be rolled to flatten the castings. Raking also helps. Some fungicides and insecticides are toxic to earthworms and should be avoided. Worms may serve as intermediate hosts of some parasites such as tapeworms. Their negatives are low in comparison to all the good they do. Several primitive peoples cook and eat nutritious worms, which can also be used as survival food. I suppose I could do this in a life-or-death situation, but it would be tough.
I have seen cooking shows where the worms have been chopped up and cooked, usually fried, and people said they tasted good. All I can visualize is the mentally challenged neighbor girl who would follow my father’s plow. She swallowed the worms which upset my poor father. He would take her home and hope she would not return. It didn’t hurt her a bit and she was always physically healthy. Maybe if I could pretend they were something else, I could eat them. In any case, for the foreseeable future, I will appreciate worms for the good things they do to help our earth. keep them for fishing and eat the fish.
