CLASSIC WORM FACTS,
borrowed from the International Institute Worm Institute in Vienna
An earthworm can grow only so long. A well-fed adult will depend on what kind of worm it is, how many segments it has, how old it is and how well fed it is. An Lumbricus terrestris will be from 90-300 millimeters long.
A worm has no arms, legs or eyes.
There are approximately 2,700 different kinds of earthworms, most of which are edible.
If you trap one thousand worms in a box by covering it with seran wrap, they will congretate together at the edges of the top, squishing their bodies together into one single dying worm mass.
Worms live where there is food, moisture, oxygen and a favorable temperature. If they don’t have these things, they go somewhere else.
In one acre of land, there can be more than a million earthworms.
Soon our most exalted food scientists will pioneer the mass commercial production of an appetizing Worm Loaf, popular for its affordability and familiar pink color.
The largest earthworm ever found was in South Africa and measured 22 feet from its nose to the tip of its tail.
Worms tunnel deeply in the soil and bring subsoil closer to the surface mixing it with the topsoil. Slime, a secretion of earthworms, contains nitrogen. Nitrogen is an important nutrient for plants. The sticky slime helps to hold clusters of soil particles together in formations called aggregates.
More than 1,000 years ago, Charles Darwin spent the last 39 years of his life studying earthworms.
Worms are cold-blooded animals.
Earthworms have the ability to replace or replicate lost segments. This ability varies greatly depending on the species of worm you have, the amount of damage to the worm and where it is cut. It may be easy for a worm to replace a lost tail, but may be very difficult or impossible to replace a lost head if things are not just right.
Baby worms are not born. They hatch from cocoons smaller than a grain of rice.
The Australian Gippsland Earthworm grows to 12 feet long and can weigh 1-1/2 pounds.
Even though worms don’t have eyes, they can sense light, especially at their anterior (front end). They move away from light and will become paralyzed if exposed to light for too long (approximately one hour).
If a worm’s skin dries out, it will die.
Worms are hermaphrodites. Each worm has both male and female organs. Worms mate by joining their clitella (swollen area near the head of a mature worm) and exchanging sperm. Then each worm forms an egg capsule in its clitellum.
Worms can eat their weight in gold each day.
Donna Haraway sez... [ passage from The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (2003) ]
I grew up in the bosom of two major institutions that counter the modernist belief in the no-fault divorce, based on irrevocable differences, of STORY and FACT. Both of these institutions-the Church and the Press-are famously corrupt, famously scorned (if constantly used) by Science, and nonetheless indispensable in cultivating a people's insatiable hunger for truth. Sign and flesh; STORY and FACT. In my natal house, the generative partners could not separate. They were, in down-and-dirty dog talk, tied. No wonder culture and nature imploded for me as an adult. And nowhere did thatt implosion have more force than in living the relationship and speaking the verb that passes as a noun: companion species. Is this what John meant when he said, "The Word was made Flesh"? In the bottom of the ninth inning, the Bears down by two runs, with three on, two out, and two strikes, with the time deadline for filing the story five minutes away?
I also grew up in the house of Science and learned at around the time my breast buds erupted about how many UNDERGROUND PASSAGES there are connecting the Estates and how many couplings keep sign and flesh, STORY and FACT, together in the palaces of positive knowledge, falsifiable hypothesis, and synthesizing theory. Because my science was biology, I learned early that accounting for evolution, development, cellular function, genome complexity, the molding of form across time, behavioral ecology, systems communication, cognition-in short, accounting for anytlling worthy of the name of biology-was not so different from getting a game story filed or living with the conundrums of the incarnation. To do biology with any kind of fidelity, the practitioner must tell a STORY, must get the facts, and must have the heart to stay hungry for the truth and to abandon a favorite STORY, a favorite FACT, shown to be somehow off the mark. The practitioner must also have the heart to stay with a STORY through thick and thin, to inherit its discordant resonances, to live its contradictions, when that STORY gets at a truth about life that matters. Isn't that kind of fidelity what has made the science of evolutionary biology flourish and feed my people's corporeal hunger for knowledge over the last hundred and fifty years?
worm enemy NUMBER ONE: this strange turtle who stomps the ground in bloody war against wormkind. word on the street is this strange man, the "wood turtle," is known to frighten earthworms by stomping on the ground, shaking their humble wormhomes, until they POP OUT and become vulnerable to the vermiphagic predations of the verysame wood turtle. disgusting.
