You may jump when you touch one but Earthworms are great for soil. They speed up decomposition by consuming lots of dead plant material, and their burrows help aerate the soil and let water through easily. Worm casts (faeces) are rich in recycled plant nutrients that help to maintain soil fertility.
Interestingly, night crawlers - Lumbricus terestris - one of the most common and productive earthworms in North America, is an invasive species. When the forests of North America were cleared and put into cultivation, this European worm quickly displaced the native species of earthworms, which couldn't withstand the changes in the soil that came with cultivation; although the native species still exist in some areas that have never been under cultivation.
I grew up in the woods, under a log. My best friends were frogs and earthworms and the occasional copperhead! Honestly I do love them, and I've always been really careful not to harm them in any way. I actually think they're cute. My son, on the other hand, would agree with Richard.
LOL, Brittany, if you have copperheads for friends, then I am certainly going to agree with every post you make!
LOL Wise man! Actually it sounded like my main theme there was the copperhead. I did grow up around them, but the earthworms were my real friends. LOL I just had a healthy respect for the copperheads. I'm becoming incoherent now. G'night all.
We have only one venomous snake so little to fear when country walking. The one that throw a lot of townies is the Slow worm. It isn't really a worm but looks like a very big worm but is really a legless lizard which looks a bit like a snake and never fails to scare the heebie jeebies out of those that don't know the difference . With me so far!
We have geckos all around (except when I want to take a picture) and they are usually pretty small, up to five inches. But my first time in the jungle, I met one about a foot long and probably 2-3 inches wide. As I was running for my life, all the kids by my farm house started to laugh at the big brave foreigner!
We called geckos that lived in our house chit chats because of their distinctive call. . When you first encounter them it comes as something of a shock when they shed their tale to escape you.
I like worms in the garden and for fishing. I also like rat snakes and king snakes. Venomous snakes are only good for target practice.
Our backyad has lots of earthworms and I sometimes think that my husband is raising them. I know that it is very good for fertilizer. What the gardener in our house normally does is to dig for worms and mix it with the other fertilizer items like leftover dishes and vegetables. They will be put in a shallow pit to be covered by wood. But the pit is sprayed with insecticides otherwise the substance will be eaten by ants and other insects. After a week, the cover is taken off and let the compost dry in the sun. It is good fertilizer after 2 weeks of drying. Now, during the rainy season is another story. For the health of the worms, we have a small garden (5 feet by 2 feet in area) where we put the leftover vegetable trimmings like the hard part of cabbage or the leaves of broccoli. That small garden is inhabited by earthworms and I believe they eat the vegetable leftovers there.
I have two, soon to be three, large compost piles in my backyard. Since composting slows considerably in Maine during the winter and, for much of the year, I am unable to turn the compost, hot composting is sporadic at best, so it takes a while for a pile of compost to be ready for use. Plus, I compost stuff like cat litter as well, so it's generally a three-year process. Perhaps because we had such a long winter, my pile didn't flatten as much this spring as it usually does. Given the layers of snow and ice that will melt once temperatures rise in the spring, a large pile of compostable material usually sinks in considerably after a couple of weeks of warm weather, but that didn't happen nearly as much this year and my compost pile is quite large, while neither of my other pile isn't yet ready for use. So, for the first time, I have purchased worms to add to the natural supply that my compost attracts, and am hoping to see some results from it.
We have lots of them here. If you want to go fishin', you can go out to the garden, turn over a shovel of dirt and gather them.
I don't think we have enough worms in the area. We have had some really hard rains lately and very few worms came out. I think the soil would be in better condition if we had more worms. I do see Gekko's running around often. The first I saw a real one it really did scare me. We also have snakes which I am happy to say I do not see often.