Posted By crates on April 30, 2008

A couple of mornings ago on my morning walk to the beach, I was musing along, listening to the bird song, and just allowing the ambiance of the cool morning, the green forest, the sound of the little stream seep into my unconscious, letting it all trickle into my being and feeling it strengthen me for the daily routine to follow, when I noticed that I was doing a little unusual two-step. Snapping back to full awareness, I saw that for the past few minutes, I had been doing a little dance to avoid the earthworms that lay stretched out over the wet, black asphalt.

It was a warm morning, wet with an overnight rain, and the earthworms in this one stretch of road were everywhere. In one thirty foot section of road, I counted 24 earthworms. Over about a 150 feet stretch, I counted 64. All of the worms seemed to be busily crawling along across the road filled with a purpose that only earthworms could know. I assumed that the warm, wet weather combined to send a message out to the worms that all would recognize: “Ok guys, it’s time to crawl out of the protection of the earth, and to crawl out into the open over the street, braving cars, robins, shrews and who knows what else. Do not ask why…just do it!” A few years ago on a wet February morning, I counted 93 worms in my driveway and on the street in front of my house. The weather was chilly–not warm, and I could not understand why the worms decided to mass migrate.

This reminds me of a few years ago, on a nice Spring morning, I noticed that the ants in my yard were swarming…the new queens and drones were performing a mass mating flight. Not only the ant nests all over my back yard were doing this, but the nests in my front yard were also swarming. There had to be some factor, some subtle environmental cue that caused all the ant nests in the neighborhood to initiate their mating flight at the same time. The benefits of such a timed swarming can be seen…but what were the cues?

There have been other wet mornings recently (actually it would hard to have a dry morning in this benighted climate), with no worm migration. What was it about this particular morning that was different? Also the worms were only on this one stretch of road and no other part. I intently examined the side of the road in the worm-filled area, but could see no difference between this portion of road and the worm-free area.

Don’tcha just love these little mysteries?

Categories: nature
Tags: earthworms, environmental cues, nature