Colgate University Team Visits Adirondacks To Study Earthworms
Worms, WORMS, WORMS! Sad but true---those lowly, wriggling saints of the natural world, hailed as creators and saviors of the soil since the days of Charles Darwin, are now known to represent an Evil Empire. Well, maybe not evil. But it turns out that most North American earthworms were introduced from other continents, and the new arrivals, while doing some good in gardens, actually disrupt the ecology of forests, diminish the rich fabric of life in the soil, and even contribute to global warming. Click here to join a Colgate University worm study in action in the Adirondack Mountains, and watch biologist Tim McCay and his students find out which worms are making mischief.
Information on earthworms and earthworm issues can be found all over the Internet. Here are some especially relevant ones. Worm, learn, and enjoy!
To learn more about Colgate University's Tim McCay and his work on earthworms, shrews, and the forest floor ecosystem, visit: http://www.colgate.edu/facultysearch/....
To learn more about the broad project that is engaging multiple colleges and investigators, visit: http://erenweb.org/project/earthworms/.
To read about worm research being conducted by Colgate University faculty, visit: http://news.colgate.edu/2011/09/resea....
For a short article on earthworms and ecosystems, visit: http://www.caryinstitute.org/science-....
To learn how introduced earthworms can increase greenhouse gas emissions, visit: http://www.caryinstitute.org/newsroom....
For a quick crash course in what earthworms are, how they're put together, and how they live, visit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthworm.
For a good introduction to the environmental disruptions that arise from the introduction of exotic earthworms to the United States, visit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasive....
And finally, just for fun, let Sir David Attenborough, the world's foremost interpretive naturalist, introduce you to the world's largest annelid, Australia's giant Gippsland earthworm (the world's largest, it can stretch to 72 inches and sometimes more), by visiting: • Giant Gippsland Earthworm .
Subscribe to the All Things Natural with Ed Kanze podcast: http://feeds.feedburner.com/AllThings...
Visit and bookmark Producer Josh Clement's Borderless North webpage: http://mountainlake.org/bn