“There’s a worm at the bottom of the garden and his name is Wiggly Woo…”
Worms! Marvellous things, fascinating, we couldn’t do without them! Last week we looked into the, often overlooked, world of the common earthworm.
Worms are invertebrates, cold blooded mammals without a backbone. They have no arms, no legs, no eyes, in fact there isn’t a lot to them…but they perform a very important job! Worms like to live in cool, dark, damp places, they eat soil and dead, rotten leaves producing worm casts that enrich the quality of the soil they live in. They create intricate underground tunnels beneath our feet, allowing plant roots to grow more easily and gain access to water and essential nutrients. They are also a food source for other animals; birds, hedgehogs, frogs and toads.
Worms don’t have lungs so breathe through their skin. When they feel the vibrations of the rain falling overhead, they quickly wriggle to the surface, so they don’t drown in their tunnels. With this knowledge in mind, we started to perform a ‘rain dance’, ‘heal, toe, stomp’, to encourage the worms to rise to the surface so we could see them.
But, despite valiant efforts by all ‘rain dancers’ we only saw three worms all week!
