![]() ![]() The study is in the journal Global Change Biology. But when farmers switched to no-till or conservation agriculture, worm populations wriggled back to normal numbers after about a decade. They looked at 65 years'-worth of farm field studies, spanning the globe.Īnd they found that in heavily plowed fields, half the earthworms had disappeared. Schmidt and his colleague Maria Briones analyzed the relationship between tilling and the health of a dozen species of earthworms. "Because they're so big, so they're chopped, exposed to birds, and their channels are destroyed." Which makes them especially vulnerable to the plow. And at night they surface," looking for food-manure, straw, stuff like that, "and they pull it into their channels." "They live all their life in a single vertical channel in the soil. One particularly interesting group of worms, he says, are the so-called "anecic" worms: the deep soil dwellers. They're our friends, they're really important." "I love earthworms, earthworms are brilliant. And not among those who would criticize Darwin for his interests. Olaf Schmidt is a soil ecologist at University College Dublin. He evolves from monkeys and the monkeys evolved from earthworms." ![]() "There's a famous cartoon where Darwin as an old man is in the middle. And earthworms were a passion: he wrote about their habits, their soil-tilling abilities, and even kept pots of worm-filled soil in his study.īut his fascination was met with ridicule by some. It's called The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms. But the last book he ever wrote gets far less attention today. Charles Darwin is, most famously, the author of The Origin of Species. ![]()
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