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Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England

fwi.co.uk

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Re: Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England

#51

Post by zizee »

mads wrote: post #46
photoguy112 wrote: post #13

Back when I was a kid, after a heavy downpour the roads would be crowded with earthworms. You really had to watch where you step to avoid stepping on one of those suckers. Fast forward today and I RARELY see a single worm out on the road after a similar downpour.

Also did anyone notice that they don’t clean off insects off their car as often as before? Just 10 years ago, when I used to commute 170km every day in my car, I would have to clean the windshield regularly. I think I cleaned it once the last year and I even travel further today...

Same car? Could improved aerodynamics play a part?

Re: Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England

#52

Post by black-tea »

mads wrote: post #46
photoguy112 wrote: post #13

Back when I was a kid, after a heavy downpour the roads would be crowded with earthworms. You really had to watch where you step to avoid stepping on one of those suckers. Fast forward today and I RARELY see a single worm out on the road after a similar downpour.

Also did anyone notice that they don’t clean off insects off their car as often as before? Just 10 years ago, when I used to commute 170km every day in my car, I would have to clean the windshield regularly. I think I cleaned it once the last year and I even travel further today...

You drive too far. That's insane.

Re: Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England

#53

Post by acqq »

frutiger wrote: post #48
yingw787 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yeah. Be careful with what you wish for. One day us humans might not be just dominant, we will be alone. And in that sense, I don't want us to prevail against Mother Nature; I just want a healthy balance.

Mother Nature has been around for a very long time. She will not remember us when we are gone.

> Mother Nature (...) will not remember us when we are gone.

She will. Yes, she will outlive us, but with very heavy losses. Due to these losses, it will be very obvious we have existed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

"one of the most significant extinction events in the history of the Earth" ... "is mainly a result of human activity."

"The current rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than natural background rates."

And we "just started" (considering the known effects of the human induced global warming).

Re: Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England

#54

Post by cpursley »

CalRobert wrote: post #40

I was out digging in my field yesterday (in Ireland, not England) and thought it was interesting that there was a large variance in worm counts. Some areas had massive numbers of worms pushing 20cm, and others had relatively few, smaller ones. The bigger worms were in areas that hadn't been grazed by sheep, but I'm not sure how that relates, if at all (the sheep have been gone for a few years).

Speaking of Ireland, the stereotype is true. The grass really is that green. What is in your soil that causes this? Nitrogen?

Re: Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England

#55

Post by paulddraper »

black-tea wrote: post #52
mads wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also did anyone notice that they don’t clean off insects off their car as often as before? Just 10 years ago, when I used to commute 170km every day in my car, I would have to clean the windshield regularly. I think I cleaned it once the last year and I even travel further today...

You drive too far. That's insane.

Time wise though, it might be a faster commute than in Silicon Valley.

Re: Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England

#56

Post by jeffwass »

I may have taken part in this study with my kids at the Barnes Wetland Center last year. They had a kids ‘science’ event held during one of the school breaks, they had fun contributing to a “real” scientific experiment/survey.

We dug a hole of a specific size in a grassy field (the shovel was exactly the right dimensions) and counted how many worms we found in the soil to a set depth. We found a few worms, don’t remember the number or what should have been normal.

We also did a butterfly count there as well, which was less formal (not under guidance of a Wetlands worker). What was cool was meeting an amateur lepidopterologist at the time who pointed us towards several camouflaged cocoons in another area. Fun stuff.

Re: Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England

#57

Post by lazyjones »

mads wrote: post #46
photoguy112 wrote: post #13

Back when I was a kid, after a heavy downpour the roads would be crowded with earthworms. You really had to watch where you step to avoid stepping on one of those suckers. Fast forward today and I RARELY see a single worm out on the road after a similar downpour.

Also did anyone notice that they don’t clean off insects off their car as often as before? Just 10 years ago, when I used to commute 170km every day in my car, I would have to clean the windshield regularly. I think I cleaned it once the last year and I even travel further today...

I guess you eradicated all insects along your commute route.

More seriously, my car is full of dead insects just from a few trips to the airport and I live in a metro area with almost 2 million people.

Re: Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England

#58

Post by manmal »

mads wrote: post #46
photoguy112 wrote: post #13

Back when I was a kid, after a heavy downpour the roads would be crowded with earthworms. You really had to watch where you step to avoid stepping on one of those suckers. Fast forward today and I RARELY see a single worm out on the road after a similar downpour.

Also did anyone notice that they don’t clean off insects off their car as often as before? Just 10 years ago, when I used to commute 170km every day in my car, I would have to clean the windshield regularly. I think I cleaned it once the last year and I even travel further today...

Yes, insects are also vastly reduced. In my region, there’s an increase in ticks (and tick-borne disease) because there are less insects, leading to less birds, leading to thriving ticks. So, an annoying side effect of reduced insect count is that we have lots of ticks in our gardens.

BTW we have non-organic agricultural fields in 50m distance of our house, so that _might_ be a factor for the dying insects.

Oh, and organic agriculture also uses pesticides. They just use different („natural“) ones.

Re: Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England

#59

Post by gnat »

CalRobert wrote: post #41
ALittleLight wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of a passage in the book Sapiens, where the author muses that there may have been prehistoric tribes where grandparents told tales of when mammoths were so plentiful hunters would take them every month, and the grandchildren would smile and nod. The grandchildren would in turn grow up and tell their grandchildren that there were once beasts called mammoths, and these grandchildren too would smile and…

The shifting baselines problem comes up a lot; it related to fish catches It's described more here - https://oceana.org/blog/daniel-pauly-and-george-monbiot-conv... and aptly illustrated here - https://oceana.org/sites/default/files/285468/catch_of_the_d... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline

Daniel Pauly is amazing. We hosted him for a conference here in NZ a few years ago. Such a mind!

What is your connection to shifting baselines and fishing policy? My father (former commercial fisherman) is part of a recreational fishing group arguing that the goal of fish policy should be abundance not short-term profit. http://legasea.co.nz

Re: Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England

#60

Post by blubbi »

randcraw wrote: post #22
fouc wrote: post #12

Probably a result of tiling the soil. Disturbing the natural ecosystem of it. And pesticides too presumably. Something like permaculture could help. Chop and drop. Mulching on the spot.

True only if tilling has increased recently. The question is, what has changed since the last time the dead fields had earthworms? That's the cause. Reversing or neutralizing that change is the cure. Let's figure out how to fix this the right way, and now , before the remaining fields die off too.

I don't know the numbers for the UK but here [1] are some numbers for Bavaria with worm counts from a lot of monitoring spots starting in the 80s. (sorry, slides are in German)

In the conclusion the author says a connection to the tilling method is likely. (worm numbers in Bavaria actually have increased as more and more farmers have changed away from "full" tilling).

[1] https://www.lfu.bayern.de/boden/bodendauerbeobachtung/fachta...

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