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littleoc
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In North America!
I had a running project for a few years on native woodlands in North America. Very, very few are left, and in most the native grass is being suffocated by leaf detritus. (In an untouched woodland, mild fires are critical for grass and tree growth.) But then earthworms moved into one of them and until a major drought hit, they were causing even more damage.
At the end of the last ice age (the most official one, not the current one we’re warming off in a dangerous way) glaciers were moving across the continent as they melted, taking up miles of space and destroying forests and ecosystems as well as shaping the landscape. (If you know where to look, you can find hidden, cool-temp areas that glaciers didn’t scratch up, which can be told apart from other surfaces because the plants there are ancient, ice-age creatures that usually don’t need more than .2mm soil or even less. They’re always weirdly cold and wet even in the middle of summer, usually at higher elevations. It feels like stepping back into time.)
The glaciers suffocated all the North American earthworms. (And many, many nematodes.) For thousands of years, there were no worms in forests. So plants adapted to be able to get nutrients, with the help of fungi and bacteria, from a layer of detritus that formed.
Then Europeans arrived, and brought bulbs and other plant things that contained worms (or at least their eggs). Europeans believed that worms were pests that made their vegetables and plant roots rot, so they weren’t purposefully transplanting them. Asian worms also ended up intermingling with European ones, as well.
In the 1800s, Charles Darwin got a bit overwhelmed with life (political leaders were using his theories of evolution to spread hate (survival of the fittest does not have anything to do with mentally retarded people — it’s passing on good genes, not humans picking out who should be allowed to breed), and to their dismay he chose to become more subtle in his own research topics). Darwin got really, really interested in worms, which he felt were underdogs that unfairly got a lot of hate. So he kept some and watched what they did.
He found that they made soil light and airy (making it easier for roots to move through, he felt), that they moved nutrients from the top of the soil to lower layers, and they might have been protecting some plants from infection.
Worms got really popular in gardens after that. People stopped killing worms all the time. (Soon it’ll be the same for wasps.)
Turns out those qualities are true but work best for plants that are adapted to that kind of soil. Worms are keystone species, being able to change the dynamics of entire ecosystems. So that’s why there have been headlines about them slowly migrating into North American forests (and woodlands, but woodlands haven’t made headlines unless it was fire related for years, besides the one article that claimed “woodlands aren’t junk forests,” back when everyone thought they were). They’ve been causing a significant loss of biodiversity.
So yeah, worms aren’t native to North America. Cool stuff in my opinion
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