
Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England - kibwen
https://www.fwi.co.uk/arable/land-preparation/soils/major-survey-finds-worms-are-rare-or-absent-in-20-of-fields
======
photoguy112
Back when I was a kid, after a heavy downpour the roads would be crowded with
earthworms. You really had to watch where you step to avoid stepping on one of
those suckers. Fast forward today and I RARELY see a single worm out on the
road after a similar downpour.

~~~
mads
Also did anyone notice that they don’t clean off insects off their car as
often as before? Just 10 years ago, when I used to commute 170km every day in
my car, I would have to clean the windshield regularly. I think I cleaned it
once the last year and I even travel further today...

~~~
zizee
Same car? Could improved aerodynamics play a part?

~~~
NeedMoreTea
I noticed the effect motorcycling. With an aerodynamically unchanged helmet
and headlight, riding mainly naked bikes.

Last time I saw this crop up in a thread another comment claimed they actually
were using the same car.

Maybe 50 years of these rivers of metal boxes reliably taking out trillions of
insects yearly has played a part too.

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maxerickson
In the US, invasive worms are converting forests from fungal decomposition
regimes to bacterial decomposition regimes.

Not a great development for mushroom foragers.

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/invasive-
earthwor...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/invasive-earthworms-
denude-forests/)

Fun stuff.

~~~
pilsetnieks
> Not all foreign earthworms are destructive. Of the 5,000 species around the
> globe, only about 16 of the European and Asian varieties do the real damage.
> One of them is the night crawler (Lumbricus terrestris), a popular fish bait
> that can measure up to 15 to 20 centimeters (six to eight inches). Another
> is the Alabama jumper (Amynthas agrestis)—also known as the snake worm or
> crazy worm—an aggressive Asian worm that lives at high densities and can
> literally jump off the ground or out of a bait can, according to fishing
> lore.

So maybe we should use some of the remaining 4984 species of worms as fish
bait?

~~~
hinkley
Red wigglers are also useful for both purposes, and because they don't burrow
they have trouble overwintering.

It's not perfect, but they are held to be a lesser of evils.

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fouc
Probably a result of tiling the soil. Disturbing the natural ecosystem of it.
And pesticides too presumably.

Something like permaculture could help. Chop and drop. Mulching on the spot.

~~~
randcraw
True only if tilling has _increased_ recently. The question is, what has
changed since the last time the dead fields had earthworms? That's the cause.
Reversing or neutralizing that change is the cure.

Let's figure out how to fix this the right way, and _now_ , before the
remaining fields die off too.

~~~
blubbi
I don't know the numbers for the UK but here [1] are some numbers for Bavaria
with worm counts from a lot of monitoring spots starting in the 80s. (sorry,
slides are in German)

In the conclusion the author says a connection to the tilling method is
likely. (worm numbers in Bavaria actually have increased as more and more
farmers have changed away from "full" tilling).

[1]
[https://www.lfu.bayern.de/boden/bodendauerbeobachtung/fachta...](https://www.lfu.bayern.de/boden/bodendauerbeobachtung/fachtagung/doc/walter.pdf)

~~~
blubbi
Sorry, I should probably add that the worm number also very heavily depends on
the kind of ground you have on your fields. In case that is not apparent from
the slides ;-)

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CalRobert
I was out digging in my field yesterday (in Ireland, not England) and thought
it was interesting that there was a large variance in worm counts. Some areas
had massive numbers of worms pushing 20cm, and others had relatively few,
smaller ones. The bigger worms were in areas that hadn't been grazed by sheep,
but I'm not sure how that relates, if at all (the sheep have been gone for a
few years).

~~~
cpursley
Speaking of Ireland, the stereotype is true. The grass really is that green.
What is in your soil that causes this? Nitrogen?

~~~
redtexture
It is a well watered island, for one, with climate moderated by the Gulf
Stream, even though well north of the US (The Boston USA latitude 42+, Dublin
53+).

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ekianjo
Any link to the actual study? Potential pitfalls of this kind of study:

\- is the historical data available?

\- is the decrease significant?

\- is the sample size sufficient?

\- is the sampling method reliable? (and conducted in the same conditions as
the previous data points?)

\- is there a difference between cultivated fields and uncultivated fields?

\- is there any correlation between cultivation types and worm presence (not
just usage of pesticides, but also types of cultures?)

\- are there differences in soil properties (minerals, etc...)

etc...

I'd really like to have reporters link to the actual paper, or even better,
datasets, in this time and age.

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jeffwass
I may have taken part in this study with my kids at the Barnes Wetland Center
last year. They had a kids ‘science’ event held during one of the school
breaks, they had fun contributing to a “real” scientific experiment/survey.

We dug a hole of a specific size in a grassy field (the shovel was exactly the
right dimensions) and counted how many worms we found in the soil to a set
depth. We found a few worms, don’t remember the number or what should have
been normal.

We also did a butterfly count there as well, which was less formal (not under
guidance of a Wetlands worker). What was cool was meeting an amateur
lepidopterologist at the time who pointed us towards several camouflaged
cocoons in another area. Fun stuff.

------
gpm
> has shown they are rare or absent in two out of five fields

The title presumably should say 40%

~~~
stuart78
Or is it 1 out of 5 fields? Big difference!

~~~
wjn0
> 42% of fields studied had poor earthworm diversity

> 21% of fields lacked surface-dwelling worms

Seems pretty clear to me. Some vs. none...

~~~
pvaldes
Talking here about "earthworm diversity", is another thing that is wrong.

To identify earthworms is difficult even for experienced taxonomists and you
need a microscope, a disection table and a lot of training. Polychaetes are
much easier by comparison and I can assure you that they aren't easy. You need
months of study.

Not, not everybody can do the work of a biologist. Not even the smartest
children. Is complex, and hard work. Unless you want to classify the diversity
of worms into "small", "medium sized" and "big worm", dig a hole and count
isn't enough.

------
bayesian_horse
They took this Leave campaign too far.

~~~
cauk
Laughed more than I care to admit

------
richjdsmith
Related anecdote: I moved to a small town in the West Midlands in the UK from
Barcelona last year. One of the things I first noticed was an absence of
nature sounds (but you can always hear a motorway, no matter how far you walk
:( ). This is compared to living in downtown Barcelona in El Born. I finally
figured it out after going back for a visit to Barcelona that there are just
substantially fewer birds here, or at least in the area I live. I wonder if
that's because there is less food for them?

------
interfixus
Summer 2017 we were overwhelmed by snails and worm of various species. Summer
2018 was long, hot, and dry. We hardly saw any. But of course they are there.
Occasionally, the cats drag in an earthworm. Last winter, mice moved into the
house in numbers. We heard them occasionally saw them, cats were constantly on
edge, and the mice somehow managed to thrive on catfood. This winter, not a
rodent in sight. And this winter so far has been clement. come summer, I
expect we'll see snails and worms and mice up to normal - though probably not
excessive levels.

 _Not_ claiming there are no longer term downward trends. There may well be.
I'm not qualified to judge. But often wonder why the huge year-to-year
variability of small, fast-breeding species is so rarely touched upon in this
kind of article. Small critters can bounce back in force within very short
intervals, given anything resembling decent conditions.

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lostlogin
I wonder what volume ‘a spadeful’ is? Presumably not a garden spade?

Edit: 20x20x20 cm volume.
[https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0203909)

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DougN7
Is this a relatively new development?

~~~
notable_user
The article makes it seem like this hasn’t been studied in depth before (maybe
just in the UK?). Sound like they were just trying to get baselines, and the
next step would be to understand the whys.

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thorin
Lots of worms in my garden. I did a survey yesterday...

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drugme
Did anyone else notice that the article seems to be confused about "two
fifths" versus "20 percent"?

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pvaldes
Without more context the study is not very useful

pesticides, copper levels, phreatic level, number and species of hammerhead
flatworms...

~~~
losteric
Those questions are exactly why a study like this is useful - we didn't know
there was a problem, now we can ask the questions to find out what's going on.

~~~
pvaldes
We knew there was a problem since decades in fact, the disemination of
tropical hammerhead flatworms that predate earthworms and can release the same
neurotoxin as fugu fishes (in our potatoes?).

But we shouldn't fall in the temptation of making a mountain from a sand
grain. Falling in gross extrapolation for clickbait purposes is as bad as no
data. I can be wrong, but it seems that what we have here is an article done
in part by volunteers and non professional ecologists (there is a variability
in the observers), about a local area and in a narrow date interval.

Would be like to register what I ate the 23-Jan and assume that this is what I
will eat for the rest of the year. Earthworm populations can raise and fall as
a normal process.

And we should not mistake quantity by quality. I had analysed marine trophic
chains and marine annelida appear everywhere. There is a huge biodiversity in
sea worms. Huge loads of some species is bad, not good. Means that the
ecosystem is in big trouble. With earthworms is the same. Not finding
earthworms is not always a problem and finding a lot of them is not always
good news.

