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Study Shows Worm Grunters Imitate Moles
Science_afficionado writes "In the southeastern US, fisherman have an unusual way to collect earthworms for bait. The practice is called worm grunting, fiddling, snoring, or charming. It involves pounding a wooden stake into the ground and rubbing the top of the stake with a long piece of steel to produce a grunting sound that causes earthworms to come to the surface where they can be easily collected for bait. A study published today in the open access journal PLoS ONE shows that the technique works because the worm grunters are unknowingly imitating the sounds created by burrowing moles. Full text of the paper is available at PLoS ONE."
I protest! I protest mightily!
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
When i went fishing with my father we often got worms like this. He told me it represented moles. News at 11.
Better recipe:
take a metal pole
stick it in the ground (first!)
take a long (15ft) thick wire
wire the pole to a connector with one pin
stick that pin into the phase of your home ac
You'll see the worms jump out of the ground.
disclaimer etc: Of course you all are smart enough to pull the plug first and then collect the worms.
Different living things react to different things differently. That's nature. It's actually fun to observe, when you have time.
We did similar things to crabs too.
There is a kind of smallish crab living in the rice paddies. After harvesting season, we let the paddies to dry up. And those crabs would dig holes and live in there, to keep them wet and cool.
How do we get them? We dig the holes. But that's hard work, as some go as deep as one meter. And we were losing to our main competitor, some crab-eating egret. Those egrets could get the crabs many times faster than we could.
So, one day, we just sat there, watching how the egrets get them. We saw the egrets knock on the top of the hole with their beak or their foot, in certain frequency, and the crabs would just come out of their holes.
Ah hah, we just imitated the egrets, knocked on the hole too, and they came out. No more digging. I was nine.
Well, if you read your Wikipedia link, you'll find that the first World Championships in 1980 were in fact in the UK - some 20 years before Sopchoppy :P
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
I sit in a cube all day. The fact that I could stick a broom handle in the ground, rub a server rail on it, and summon my own army of earthworms is news to me. It is also useful and practical, should I ever get attacked by an dirt monster.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
If the worms are indeed fleeing what they believe are burrowing moles, I wonder if the technique would work in places where moles do not exist?
In Australia for instance, we have plenty of earthworms, including the world's largest (which grow up to three metres long) yet we have no native moles. Logically you would expect the worms not to react, but perhaps worms in Australia would be trying to flee bandicoots or bilbies.
The thing is I don't know whether bandicoots or bilbies sound like burrowing moles. Perhaps you would need a smaller stake, or a longer saw. Could be an interesting experiment though.
If the pattern goes 9am, 10am, 11am, why isn't noon 12am?