Wormology
adapted
from
Worms Eat Our Garbage by Mary Applehof, Mary Frances Fenton, Barbara Loss
Harris
A worm has a soft
body and has no bones beneath its skin.
The body of a worm is
made of many little rings with grooves between them. Each of these rings is
called a segment.
Each segment has
tiny bristles on it that help the worm grab a hold of the soil to move through
it.
A worm has no arms,
legs or eyes.
If you look at a
worm closely you can see that its skin is shiny. That is because a worm’s skin
is moist. Worms have no lungs, they breathe through their skin and that is why
they need a moist protective coating. The oxygen in the air is dissolved by the
water on the worm’s skin and then the oxygen is absorbed through the skin into
the worm’s body. So if the worm dries out it will suffocate.
Even though in our
pretend pictures worms have eyes, in real life they do not. But they are
sensitive to light and dark (they like the dark) and wet and dry (they like
MOIST conditions, they don’t want to dry out or DROWN in too much water).
The front end of the
worm is its mouth. The mouth has a flap over it to protect it like our lips
protect our mouth. This is very small and hard to see with the naked eye. The
other end of the worm is where the worm castings come out. Worm castings is a
“scientific” way of saying worm poop. Now talking about worm poop might sound
rude, but worm poop is important plant food. It is nature’s perfect fertilizer.
Worms help make the
soil good for plants to grow by helping in two ways. One is providing the
castings for fertilizers, and the other is by making their tunnels through the
soil which makes the soil loose and that makes it easy for plants’ roots to grow
in the soil and get to the “fertilizer” the worms leave behind.
Favorite worm food:
worms eat organic matter. In nature that means parts of dead plants and animals.
Worms have small mouths so they wait until other animals break down the food
into smaller particles before they eat it. Since worms have no teeth they need
soft, moist food so that is another reason to keep a worm bed moist.
Worms come from
something called a cocoon. It is not the kind of cocoon that a caterpillar forms
to turn into a butterfly. The cocoon is a little shell that holds two or more
baby worms as they develop. When they get big enough they will break out of the
cocoon and hatch. It takes about three weeks for baby worms to hatch out of
their cocoon.
How to tell the head
from the tail end: Worms usually move head first. The band approximately in the
center of the worm is usually closer to the head end. By the way, that band is
called a clitellum, but that’s a pretty big word for pre-schoolers.
The clitellum is
involved with worm mating, and worm mating is hard enough for grownups to
understand! Worms are both male AND female at the same time, (they have both
ovaries and testes).
Worms are good food
for a lot of animals because they contain a lot of protein. Many birds like to
eat worms, as do moles, mice, fish, salamanders, turtles, frogs and toads,
opossums, and raccoons.
Here are some scraps
that can go in a worm bin to feed the worms: newspaper, junk mail, rice, carrot
tops, broccoli stalks, watermelon rind, onion skin. bread crusts, apple cores,
potato peels, celery ends, leftover oatmeal, etc.
We don’t put meat,
bones, cheese, eggs, or milk in the worm bin. Worms can’t eat up this kind of
food fast enough so it rots. Those kinds of foods smell bad as they rot, can
harbor harmful bacteria, and may attract other bugs we don’t want to put them in
the worm bin.
Worm friends:
beetles, ants, snails, millipedes, pill bugs (sometimes called “roly polys”),
centipedes, (some) spiders.