Invasion of the jumping worms
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Jumping worms. They're making their way to Kansas and Missouri. Yes. Okay, so these are an invasive species. An invasive species of worms are wiggling its way into the Midwest. A recent invader to western New York that is hiding right in plain sight. They're the new pest invader. Invasive jumping worms. They jump and squiggle a whole lot. They jump. No, thank you. This is what nightmares are made of. Yeah, I'm sick of it. I can't watch this video anymore. It's just worms. I mean, come on.

This is Unexplainable. I'm Noam Hassenfeld here with senior producer Meredith Hodnot. That's me. And today, worms. Jumping worms. Yeah, what's up with these worms?

They are a big news story over the past couple months, even few past years now. They're all over the Midwest, Kansas, Missouri, Wisconsin, Minnesota, even as far east as New York State. And they're kind of a big deal. Yeah. Why are they such a big deal that like local news is covering them? I mean, first off, worms are just cool. I don't know where you've been. But these jumping worms, they're really weird. They're bonkers. They're the weirdest worms you've ever seen. Yeah.

And we really don't know that much about them. They're mysterious. They're moving fast and they're changing our ecosystems. So, OK, so the weirder thing sounds a lot more fun than the invasive part. Let's start with the fun part. I'm all about the fun. What makes them so weird? Yeah. So I talked to Bernie Williams. She's at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. And if you have a worm problem, she's the person to call.

We had a homeowner in a really urban area of Madison give us a call on a Friday afternoon, you know, when you really just want to go home from work. She was very upset. So I was like, oh, sure, I'll just drive by on my way home. And she had...

Millions, literally millions of worms just pouring out of her landscaping. They covered her driveway. They were all up and down the street in the gutters, just writhing. For some people that might be really painful.

unpleasant and you would you would run away but I was really intrigued like wow look at those jumping worms they can grow to be four to eight inches long they move like a snake when they get startled or harassed they fresh around almost like a snake would I'm hoping they'll jump for you there you go he was jumping all over the place see him now moving like a snake so these worms actually jump they jump they wriggle basically you think of like a normal worm just sort of like

scooting around on the dirt. These guys, if you come up across one of them, they like freak out and start wiggling all over the place, jumping out of your hands. They're hard to hold on to. And they're a lot more muscly than you'd expect. Muscly. Oh, sure. They're worms that go to the gym.

So these worms are worms that work out frequently. So if you hold these worms between your fingers, you know, and you really have to hold on to them because they're really active, they're firm. My analogy is that they're like a slightly overstuffed bratwurst. They move like a snake, so they reticulate to get away from you, and they're really, really fast.

They don't really tunnel deep into the soil, so they generally are right on the surface. And there's always many of them.

In the summer, I was collecting them and I brought them back in buckets and I just had them sitting at my desk in this big government building. And when I came back on Monday morning, they had popped the lids off of those containers and they were all over the cubicles. So I wasn't very popular on my floor in my aisle for quite a while because people were finding dead worms everywhere. So they are really, really active.

It may be impossible to eradicate jumping worms. The science is currently lagging in terms of, well, what do you do once we get them? If one earthworm's output of offspring is in the hundreds, one earthworm can have a big impact.

And this is where we get to the whole jumping worms might be a problem part. Yeah. So jumping worms can take over a place really quickly. They're asexual, so they can reproduce on their own. And they just lay tons of their little wormy egg cocoon things. And so one worm can lead to a lot of worms. Oh, yeah. And these worms move so quickly that, you know, it's...

It's speeding up so fast. And I gave myself worms. Wait, the worm lady gave herself jumping worms? Yes.

Yeah, her co-workers wanted her to make a T-shirt saying, I've got worms. I had been at the Arboretum earlier in the day and, you know, I came home and I usually would change my shoes, but I pulled the car in, I parked and I looked and I could see some weeds in my roundabout in front of my house. So I just, I walked over.

with my shoes that I'd been wearing at the Arboretum and there was still some caked on soil. And so I obviously had some cocoons stuck in that soil. I walked around, I was pulling weeds. I didn't even think about it. And two months later, I had worms.

I had worms coming out of everything. And my husband said, don't tell people we have those worms. I'm like, I'm not telling you. I mean, but those worms, they move because that's the thing with them. If you have them, your neighbors are going to get them too. You know, I tried all sorts of different things. I would pluck them out of the soil. I would just walk around with a Ziploc baggie. And when I'd see them, I'd drop them in the Ziploc baggie and say, damn you.

invasive species always cause harm. Jumping worms are a newer type of invasive species in the state. A recent invader that is hiding right in plain sight. The worm's presence has created a cascade of degradation to the soil.

Okay, so lots of jumping worms all over the place. Right. But what makes these worms invasive? Like, what's the actual harm that they're doing? Well, the biggest thing is probably that they're pushing out all the other worms in the neighborhood. So when you're digging around in the garden, you're going to see different species of earthworms, you know, so you'll see the nightcrawler, you'll see the red wiggler, you'll see the gray worms, you'll see a variety pack of

them and they all live harmoniously together. So they all get along. Everybody's doing their thing. It's fine and dandy. And then when you get jumping worms moving into this equation, there seems to be a collapse.

You tend to see the complete crash of all the earthworms. So we're not quite sure, you know, do they release some type of chemical, almost like invasive plants can do? Do they have a virus associated with them? There's a big mystery there.

And is it bad to push out other worms? Yeah. All these other worms are really important. They turn over the soil. They provide fertilizer. They are nature's recyclers. You know, earthworms are absolutely incredible at what they do in agricultural fields, in your yards, in your gardens. They're doing what they're meant to do.

Other worms go deep into the soil. They're like at all layers. They're recycling, eating as they go. They're making these little tunnels that help air and water move through the soil. But jumping worms, they're really just at the surface. Okay. Maybe like two inches deep.

And so they're just like churning through all that organic matter over and over again, basically leaving nothing behind but like these like dry coffee ground taco meat looking crumbly bits of earth. And that's bad news for a lot of plants. So this is both about jumping worms messing with the soil and also messing with other worms? Yeah. And we don't really know the consequences of all this. There's been concern, you know, across many states that

From Vermont to Kansas, you know, to the Great Smoky Mountains, you can see the effects of jumping worms and what they're doing. And they really do change the soil profile in which almost like it changes that signature of the soil. So it makes it less hospitable for things to grow, you know.

You know, if you are seeing native plants that can't sustain the front of these worms, then there's a dynamic shift taking place that I think will just continue to grow. Invasive plants and animals are constantly introduced into our local ecology. Jumping worms originated in Asia. They come from Asia. Comes from Asia and has been introduced into the United States. So what do we do? Do we just stop all the foreign worms from coming over here?

They're already here, you know, and this is where invasiveness gets a little bit complicated. OK. One of the things that I was really surprised to learn was that, you know, the worms that we're all familiar with, those night crawlers, the wriggly guys that you see in compost bins. Sure, sure. They're not native to North America. You're looking at, you know, European earthworms as this first invasion front. When you look at the history of

of where they should be and shouldn't be, they don't really belong in a great portion of North America. Over the decades and centuries, earthworms took hold here and ended up being really useful for our agricultural system. So even though they came from somewhere else, they ended up kind of integrating and helping out the soil here? Exactly. And at least how we use the soil, right? There's actually kind of a parallel story to honeybees here.

Honeybees are not native to North America. They were considered a terrible invasive that the European settlers brought over. But now...

We are completely dependent upon them. Common things like almonds or watermelons or cherries would be super rare if we didn't have honeybees. I think about that with worms, too. I mean, agricultural fields, they are dependent on these detrivores turning over the soil. So, you know, we can't survive without this technically invasive species because of the way we grow our food.

So do we just sit back and hope all the jumping worms just end up being super friendly in the end? I mean, so Bernie cautioned that there's a lot we don't know about these worms compared to European earthworms. These are a little more mysterious. They're like the secret agent. They're not telling you a whole lot up front. You know, you're going to learn more with...

with every year that passes. So yeah, I never sound the alarm because I think when, you know, if you're an alarmist, people just get way too upset and we don't know enough. So these jumping worms seem like a problem now, but, you know, maybe they won't be in the future or maybe they won't stick around at all. And it's not just worms. I mean, especially with global warming, more and more species are just going to be moving all over the place.

We have to understand that, you know, going forward, there's going to be more because, you know, the climate is changing. And so you need to adapt. And so I always tell people, adapt, adapt, adapt and change.

You know, just to smile when I say like, oh, there's something worse coming. There are. It's like, I'm a big fan of planaria, which is a predator flatworm. Oh, and they're going to come. And then people are going to be like, oh, and when that one comes, I'm going to be like, oh yeah, planaria. So there's so- The bad boy of the neighborhood. Oh yeah. Wow. Are they cool animals? But they're on our doorstep too. Yeah.

So, you know, jumping worms, they're here to stay. And then there's other ones that are going to come that are going to scare people even more. But that is nature. You know, that is science. And that is who we are as a global society. Up next, invasive species are coming from inside the house. Support for Unexplainable comes from Greenlight.

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That's greenlight.com slash unexplainable to try Greenlight for free. greenlight.com slash unexplainable. I want to try one of my worms. Take that, you worm. Worms. Unexplainable, we're back.

In the first half of the show, we were talking about jumping worms, these weird worms that have gotten lots of attention in large part because of the fact that they're an invasive species, which essentially means that they have impacts that humans don't like.

But that term, invasive species, it relies on a pretty basic assumption. So I think it has historically been conflated with, well, if you're not from here, then you are most likely going to be invasive. Somya Shah is the author of a book all about animal movement called The Next Great Migration. We've really crafted a lot of our policies around conservation based on that idea that if something is not from here...

however we define that, then it is likely to become invasive and therefore we should sort of repel it even before it causes any actual damage. Invasiveness certainly happens, but it's not necessarily about where a species comes from. If you wanted to look at this in human terms, right? So let's use a metaphor. Like if you looked at immigrants and crime, people move into new places, some of them commit crimes. But what we also know is that

immigrants commit fewer crimes than the host societies they enter. So it's not to say that no immigrant ever causes crime. It's to say that crime is not a problem of immigration. So you could look at the same thing with wild species, right? Like 10% of species that move into new places can actually gain a foothold.

Of those, only 10% cause any kind of problems that we would deem invasive. So we're talking about 1% of all species that are on the move actually causing these problems of invasiveness.

Do you want to then say all species on the move that are, quote unquote, non-native should be repelled sort of prophylactically because 1% might cause a problem? Well, 99% of them are not causing any problem at all. So then where does the idea of invasive species as foreign come from? So the kind of father of invasion biology is Charles Elton, the famous ecologist. And he wrote this little tiny book right after World War II. Mm-hmm.

You know, if you read it now, it's like full of all these kind of military metaphors of animals that don't belong here, that are alien, that are coming and invading us. And, you know, he had this idea of niches, ecological niches, that every species has a certain place on the planet where it kind of belongs, where it has evolved over a long time and it's sort of specialized into that place.

The elephant stands in for India. The camel stands in for the Middle East. The bear stands in for North America. You know, as if like a species and its place are kind of one in the same. And so according to that theory, there's not really a lot of similarities

space for things to move into new places. And once they get a foothold, it's very difficult to get rid of them. So really, we should just preventively close the borders, pull up the ladders, don't let them come at all. His idea was we should be getting rid of those right away. So then what's a better way to look at where species belong? First of all, we don't really have a very clear idea of where things belong. You know, that's an assumption we've made.

that equals a nice shorthand and also translates into policies that make sense to the xenophobes among us.

And so it has a lot of currency. You know, it feels right because I think there's a sense of like, well, everyone belongs in a certain place and nature is like has to have this certain order and things being out of order kind of I find it repellent and it kind of violates my sense of like how things should be. But, you know, what we're learning is that mobility across what we thought were geographic barriers like mountains and oceans and deserts.

This happens all the time. So it really kind of problematizes this idea of like, where does something belong? I mean, people think that earthworms have been in America forever, and most of them have only been here for a few hundred years, and now they're considered local.

Exactly. You know, all these animals and species have been moving over time into new places. So, you know, camels, we think of them as from the Middle East and they belong there. Well, actually, they originated in North America. And actually, you find the most wild camels in Australia because things are moving all along because that's how we have adapted to environmental change on this planet that is very dynamic.

So if invasiveness does happen and it's not about a species being foreign, how could a species that's always been somewhere be invasive? Like, what would that mean? Well,

Well, if you change an ecosystem, if you cut down all the trees, for example, something that's left behind might be able to, you know, eat up everything that's left already there. So most of these problems of invasiveness are actually occurring in ecosystems that have already been disruptive or damaged in some way. So dengue is in Florida now. And there was immediately this sense of like, oh, there's some new mosquitoes come in and cause dengue in Florida. Like, it's such a problem. We need to get rid of all those mosquitoes. Well,

Those mosquitoes had been there all along. What changed was the conditions on the ground. You knock down trees, you create new mosquito habitat, and you expand mosquito populations in certain places where people live, and then you get dengue. It's not because something has moved into the place. It's because the environment itself has changed, usually because of something we did.

Yeah. And speaking of things we did, I assume climate change is going to mean more species are moving and there's going to be a lot more alarm bells going off about invasive species, right? Yeah. And that's already happening. Species are moving into new places in sync with the changing climate. So they're moving farther north. They're moving up into the mountains.

And we want creatures to move into new places where they can actually make a living and can hang on. The problem is we're not making it easy for them. We have highways, mines, towns, farms. All of that stuff is in the way, so creatures can't move. And then when some of them do make it into new places, well, then if they're noticed...

We have policies in place that say, well, we don't want you here. You're invasive. You're not native. Like, we'll get rid of you. So there's several new efforts. And this is from invasion biologists themselves saying, look, well, species can move into new places and they will become native. You know, let's not call them

aliens because they're new here. Let's call them the new natives. Let's embrace them. Let's make it easier for them. Let's protect them. Yeah. And thinking about protecting these species, I mean, if historically the goal was sort of to preserve things in amber, you know, this is the perfect way things are. This is how they should be.

How do you think scientists should think about protecting animals going forward? I mean, I think this is where ecology is going itself. You know, there's a much greater understanding over recent decades of disruption and dynamism and, you know, novelty as being really critical to ecosystem health. In most situations where when novel species move into a new place, they actually add to biodiversity.

So I think we need to kind of develop those ideas. I don't think we really know yet what biodiversity looks like in the future in this moment of sort of extreme flux. But certainly the old ideas, I think, are not going to serve us well. I wonder if there's a possibility that people could be talking past each other on this issue, because I feel like it's very easy for someone to say,

you know, species move, they go into new ecosystems, they disrupt the ecosystem. It's usually not bad, but we have to just be more accepting of it. And then other people will point to these examples of species changing. And I think we're talking about this in a pretty nuanced area. We're talking about this sort of like, we understand that sometimes bad things happen, but most of the time they don't happen. And we shouldn't necessarily categorize all things in terms of good and bad.

But that does feel like maybe a hard message to communicate. Does it feel that way to you? I don't know. I mean, I wrote a book about it. I guess that means it was hard because I had to write a whole damn book about it. No, I don't know. I mean, I think it's a message people are open to hearing.

You know, I think there's a sense of a lot of change is happening. It's all happening very fast. And we can think of it as catastrophic. Or perhaps there's a way to think of some of it as something we can embrace. And I think that is kind of a hopeful message that people can find some comfort in. Sonia Shah is a science journalist and author of The Next Great Migration, The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move.

She's written about way more than just invasive species. And next week, she will be back on the show to talk about the astounding mysteries of animal movement across the globe and what scientists are beginning to learn from one of the most ambitious animal tracking projects in history. This episode was produced by Meredith Hodnot and me, Manding Nguyen. I also fact-checked this episode.

We had editing from Brian Resnick and Noam Hassenfeld, scoring from Meredith and Noam, who also wrote the music. Christian Ayala did the mixing and the sound design, and Bird Pinkerton is off somewhere yelling at the sky. Lauren Katz heads up our newsletter, and Liz Kelly Nelson is the VP of Vox Audio. Special thanks to Katherine Harmon-Courage, whose amazing article on jumping worms was the basis for this episode.

We are also working on an upcoming episode about endometriosis. So if you've ever experienced endometriosis or if you know someone who has, we'd really love to hear from you about what it's like to live with the condition as well as what it's like to try to get a diagnosis. So if you'd like to reach out, please email us at unexplainable at vox.com. You can also sign up for our newsletter and read our articles and find our show transcripts at vox.com slash unexplainables.

Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll be back in your feed next Wednesday.