I love worms.

When I was a kid, we would look for nightcrawlers, which you could use for fishing with great success.

You just bang a wooden stob into the ground about a foot, and then take an old wood saw and saw it back and forth on the exposed end. The vibrations would cause the worms to come up out of the ground, and you could just pick them up and drop them into a can or a tupperware bowl. Those damn old catfish would tear them up!!

Another was the so-called "cataba" worm. They would be on this weird kind of tree in the swamp, and you'd just go and pick them off. Then, when you were ready to use them as bait, you pull their heads off and turn them inside out. The catfish would really go for them.

Worms are great. I am sort of an expert on worms.

I remember reading something about how some non-indigenous species of worms were introduced to North America by the settlers:

One mentioned that it might have came from their ships that used soil as ballast, which would have been dumped out when they got here, possibly; another said that the settlers brought them here (or their own dirt, was it maybe...) in order that some crop would grow better here.

I read these when I was looking up the best way to make a "garden gold" bin a while ago. Can't seem to find the site that referred to it though.

Only two genera of Lumbricid earthworms are indigenous to North America while introduced genera have spread to areas where earthworms did not formerly exist, especially in the north where forest development relies on a large amount of undecayed leaf matter. When worms decompose that leaf layer, the ecology may shift making the habitat unsurvivable for certain species of trees, ferns and wildflowers. Another possible ecologic impact of greater earthworm numbers: larger earthworms (e.g. the night crawler, Lumbricus terrestris, and the Alabama jumper, Amynthas agrestis) can be eaten by adult salamanders, and when the salamanders do consume the earthworms they are more successful at reproduction. However, those earthworms are too large for juvenile salamanders to consume, which leads to a net loss in salamander population.

Don't panic, they are natural, and indigenous besides, they would not have survived the trip

I wonder if anybody knows whether earthworms (or their eggs) can be sold freely between countries.
It seems now that they can actually become a pest affecting local wildlife.

Originally posted by Alethea


According to info at the link, it appears that horses, cattle, sheep, goats and chickens were not indigenous to North America either. I really find this hard to believe.

I didn't know about the earthworms, but it's well known these species were all domesticated in Europe and the Middle East, then brought later to North America.

Horses were especially shocking to the Native Americans because they were usually first encountered with men riding on their backs. Supposedly, the Aztecs were very confused upon seeing the first of Cortez's men - to them it looked like a two headed, four legged beast, that then split in two when the man got off the horse (you have to remember the horses and men were probably also armored and covered with military colors, so that would have further added to their confusion). The very first domesticated horses as mounts from Asia might have given rise to the ancient Greek myths about Centaurs. When the first ridden horses were encountered by those people, it seems they may have been just as confused as the Aztecs upon first seeing them.

We take it for granted, a man on a horse, but I remember my own confusion about the Internet when I first started using it back in January of 1995. I'd only then just heard of it, but had no idea what it was, really. I fired up this newfangled Netscape thing at my college computer lab and it took me about a day to really understand just how it worked and what was really going on when I clicked these links. It was mindboggling to me. I imagine that's a bit like what someone seeing a horse and rider for the first time, without any context to relate it to, might have felt.

The Americas had buffalo, which were the main form of cattle here before Europeans came, but they were not domesticated and ran wild in massive herds numbering in the millions, sometimes. They were hunted for food, but never kept for grazing, milking, etc. Cows and oxen are distinctly Old World.