Coming to a backyard near you: JUMPING WORMS!
Huh? This sounds like something out of a horror-circus flick!
But Asian Jumping Worms ARE a “real thing”, and they are spreading throughout the Northeast, mid-Atlantic, and Central United States, threatening gardens, forests, and natural habitat. They are present in Pennsylvania now, in scattered colonies.
They look a lot like our ordinary nightcrawler earthworms, except they can be slightly shorter and narrower. They can move alarmingly fast, serpentining like snakes, and may actually jump up from the ground if disturbed suddenly. Asian Jumping Worms have a white/grey collar around their body close to the head end. ( Nightcrawlers have a raised pink collar near the mid body.)
These worms can reproduce without partners, so they can efficiently and quickly establish colonies where they exist. Adults, which live for one season in the warm weather, produce eggs in cocoons, which survive the winter well. Since their initial arrival about 100 years ago from Japan and Korea, likely in agricultural products and plant soil, 3 species of these dancing, active worms have now stablished themselves in 34 states, with most of the colony growth in the last
15 years. Old -growth forests are less hospitable to these worms, so the cutting down of old growth forests like Oak, Hickory, and Beech species has encouraged the success of Jumping Worms in the new growth forests of Poplar and Sweet Gum trees.
What’s the harm?
Well, these energetic worms are voracious consumers of soil surface vegetation and leaf litter. They can ruin the habitat for forest floor dwellers like salamanders, friendly earthworms, ground nesting birds, insects like centipedes, and seedling plants. With those competitors elbowed out of the way, Jumping Worms can denude the forest floor,
affecting soil microclimate, thus interfering with its ability to support any vegetation. In addition, the Jumping Worm castings (excrement) are of a firm, crumbly texture, like large grey coffee grounds. The castings do not break down readily, holding onto soil nutrients that used to be part of the soil replenishment cycle. The resultant topsoil loss undermines mature and immature trees and undergrowth plants. Jumping Worm proliferation could spell catastrophe for the future health of forests, gardens and species that depend upon them. Including us..
What to do? Several approaches are outlined by researchers:
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Clean hiking boot and shoe soles to remove Jumping Worm cocoons that may have been picked up in transit.
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Purchase heat treated gardening and landscape soils and mulches, in which worm eggs have been destroyed. Jumping worms love leaf mulch, dislike pine needles.
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Don’t purchase or use Jumping Worms as bait, or dump them in the water.
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Don’t purchase Jumping Worms for compost pile treatment, even though they eat food scraps readily.
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Examine new plant soil, pots, and roots for evidence of Jumping Worm individuals or castings, and discard them in plastic bags in the trash, if found. It’s best not to purchase new plants if their soil looks suspicious.
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To test your property for the presence of the Jumping Worms, mix 1/3 cup of ground yellow mustard seeds into one gallon of water. Pour this on the leaf litter surface in a discrete area. It will bring worms to the surface. Then inspect the worms that come up for Jumping Worms, and remove them.
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A golf course fertilizer made from tea seed meal, when applied to the soil, has been shown to irritate and eventually kill the worms. An application in late April or early May and again in the later summer targets young worms and remaining adults.
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To destroy cocoons, cover moistened soil with a length of clear plastic polyethylene for 2 or 3 weeks or until soil temp exceeds 104 degrees for 3 consecutive days
It’s obvious that current removal practices are labor-intensive, and may have limited effect. However, researchers are working on large -scale eradication methods. For the time being, we need to rely on our own elbow-grease and ingenuity to look for and rid our hyper- local areas of these worms, and to warn and educate the public about the slow but steady incursion of these Jumping Worms into Pennsylvania forests and gardens.
Good pictures and films of Jumping Worm activity may be found on You Tube, by researching Asian Jumping Worm.
See also: Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison Extension: Jumping Worms JoeGardener.com