I love THE WEEK magazine and read some of it almost immediately. Then, I dig through for weeks till I’ve found all the little pieces that will interest me. Sometimes I re-read favorite items.
I wish this article, which I suspect someone picked up from The ONION, were available online so I could offer you a link, but it wasn’t, so….
NEWS and SCIENCE: Killers on your garden: Earthworms spend their time underground eating dead plant material, recycling nutrients and improving the soil for living plants. Or so scientists thought. A recent study by German biologists hints at more troubling activity. When given a choice of foods to eat in the lab, worms of the common species Lumbricus Terrestris actively sought out and ate living, nitrogen-rich seeds and seedlings — effectively killing the plants.
I did find the article online at News-Pushpi.com — as with THE WEEK, this website claims the article came from the BBC.com which in turn claims NOT RESPONSIBLE.
The entire article that says worms eat plants, etc. is a super-crock. Worms have no teeth; they ‘eat’ microbes from decaying organic material. They don’t know if it is an apple or a leaf. OR care. Well, they seem to like decaying apples, but will do fine on your old coffee grounds and filters. The worm named has been a concern to some fanatic environmentalists because they eat decaying leaves on the forest floor, creating ‘dirt’ (worm poop), but changing the conditions which have been dependent on layers and layers of leaves or needles from trees and shrubs. However, this isn’t killing living plants.
I keep worms in tubs in my basement to compost my kitchen garbage and junk mail (paper is organic). The tomato and cantaloupe seeds are never killed in the bins; they show up in my plants after I top dress them with worm castings still containing tiny seeds.
So don’t take up arms against earthworms when you read this insanity about this activity leading to the extinction of some native plants.
My THE WEEK missed it this time…editors and column planner need to stop reading THE ONION and buying into crocks.
