There was a story in the news early this week about a new invasive species that appeared in the province for the first time. An Asian jumping worm.
Now if you’re thinking that maybe we’ll end up getting something like a Mexican jumping bean, which is actually a moth larvae inside a bean that makes it move around, that’s not what these are. In fact, they really don’t jump at all. Since it’s a worm and doesn’t have legs, it doesn’t do much jumping. It usually just lays there. Like any other worm. But if you touch it, or it feels threatened, it starts to thrash about wildly.
Since we happen to be in trout season, my immediate thought was this might be a good trout worm. If it wiggles around a lot when threatened, it would probably get really upset about being put on a hook. And all that wiggling about could attract the attention of a trout. So I started looking into it.
Turns out, the only one that has been found in the province so far was located in a potted plant. So while they can say that these worms, which seem to be a bit more aggressive than your average worm, haven’t really truly arrived yet. So I have little hope of finding one in my garden.
But then I came across something else. We don’t have many native species of worms around here. Most all our worms our imports.
The last ice age managed to wipe out most of our worms. While it was making our lakes and our drumlins, it was also doing in the worms. But when settlers from Europe arrived, they started trading back and forth with the folks back home. They would send boatloads of things from here back there. But you couldn’t just have an empty ship crossing the Atlantic, You had to have a bit of ballast in them. So they would fill them with dirt. Actually, they seemed to send us some pretty good soil. But it came with worms. And the worms have been quite at home ever since.
How trout discovered these worms were good to eat I’m not sure. But they do seem to like them some days. So if these new jumping worms start to move in, I’m willing to do my part to help control them. Feeding them to trout. One at a time. On a hook.
