The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms

Eternity can be found in the minuscule, in the place where earthworms, along with billions of unseen soil-dwelling microorganisms, engage in a complex and little-understood dance with the tangle of plant roots that make up their gardens, their cities.

Perhaps it makes sense that a creature that doesn't get ill and has few enemies among its neighbors would also live agelessly and die without explanation or cause--would simply vanish without a trace.

I have come to understand, like Darwin had, that earthworms are not destroyers, but redeemers. They move through waste and decay in their contemplative way, sifting, turning it into something else, something that is better.

Any environment, any single life is in a continuous state of change. This is just more obvious when you pay attention to earthworms. Their work may seem unspectacular at first. They don't chirp or sing, they don't gallop or soar, they don't hunt or make tools or write books. But they do something just as powerful: they consume, they transform, they change the earth.

If bacteria can be pictured as teeming black ants under the microscope, imagine fungi as gossamer spider webs. These organisms form long threads called hyphae that stretch between plant roots. Some form into even larger masses called mycelium that can span an entire backyard.

Are we so hierarchical that we can't respect a creature that lives beneath our feet?

If you allow a creek to go back to being a creek, if you let the trees and the bramble get overgrown, and you let the stream overrun its banks whenever it wants to, the wetland will take care of itself. The water that trickles into the ocean will be clean and pristine if everything is just left alone to work the way it was designed to work. Earthworms have shown that they can take care of the soil in the same way that a wetland takes care of the water. Nature regenerates. It Cleans. It hides a multitude of sins.

One is deep indigo blue," he said. "Eighteen inches long and about a thumb's width in diameter. It's got big white spots with yellow centers, like fried eggs, all over its back, if you can imagine that. And get this—it crawls on the forest floor, doesn't burrow in the ground, and its infants live in trees until they're mature.

Sometimes I wonder if it is too much of an imposition on earthworms to push them into polluted ground, or to force-feed them a particular bacteria because we'd like to see it spread around. Darwin noticed that humans tend to exploit any characteristic for their own good, writing that "in the process of selection man almost invariably wishes to go to an extreme point." Are we taking advantage of earthworms? Shouldn't we clean up our own messes, or learn not to make them in the first place?

I wish I could say that over the years I've gained some insight into the intelligence of my worms, but the most I've seen them do is act out of instinct or hunger, moving up to higher ground in the bin if water pools in the bottom, or gravitating towards food they like and away from food they don't. If they have an intellect, I don't suppose I've provided much to stimulate it.

Why is it that a worm can regrow most of its body, but we can't replace so much as a finger? I am left with the troubling conclusion that the worm's survival may, in the grand scheme of things, be more important than my own.

People ask me, why bother cataloging earthworms? Well, why catalog anything? It's how we learn about the world we live in. Besides, some of these worms are going extinct. How do you know what you're losing if you don't know what you have?

We may therefore infer—” he writes, “improbable as is the inference—that worms are able by some means to judge which is the best end by which to draw triangles of paper into their burrows.