I guess those fried eggs are really telling birds that they really don’t want to eat them!Īlthough earthworms have moved around the globe with Humans to some extent, and there are 18 different families of earthworm, there are certain generalisations of where families are mainly based or originate from. He couldn’t understand why until he realised it was when they came in contact with the damaged worm that had some body fluid around it. One of the fried egg worms had got a bit damaged, as he walked and checked on his worms he realised some of the other worms were dying. Sam worked this out the hard way as he had collected these worms first off with other worms in his pot. This worm was exciting for 2 reasons, for one its amazing colour… we all call it the fried egg worm! The other reason is it’s the only earthworm known to contain poison. One of the most exciting recent discoveries was made by Sam James in the Phillipines in 2011 called Archipheretima middeltoni. The figure should surely be over 10,000, so there is lots of work to be done! As I mentioned there are still a lot of countries with no real species lists and certainly not comprehensive. There are, we think, roughly 5,000 species of earthworm described (with continual taxonomy changes we can never be too certain) however this is just a portion of the worms really out there.
It was the first species of worm I described and I’ll never forget it! We named it azul, meaning blue in Spanish.
The highlight of trip being the discovery of a bright blue earthworm. I felt like that on my fieldwork to Nicaragua, as a team (I worked with Frontier, the conservation group) we discovered 18 new species to Nicaragua and wrote a paper describing 3 new species to science. You can feel a little like the early explorers must have done when on fieldwork to countries with no species lists and real knowledge of their earthworm fauna every stone you turn or every log you sort through can bring about the discovery of something new to science and certainly new for the country. One of the amazing things about working on earthworms is the fact that sooo little is known about them! This coupled with the fact that the more you discover about earthworms the more incredible they are, makes them, in my opinion, the best animals to work on.
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