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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.
But what do the earthworms do if not collected?
And, guess what:
Worms that were not collected began to burrow back into the ground after traveling some distance.
Damned, and i always thought that disgruntled grunted worms do a kind of lapdance. Puh, another dream not come true.
Worm sign detected.
YOU KILLED THE FLYING SPAGHETTI MONSTER!
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/exploration/resources/wormgrunt_harvest_800.jpg
It's been known for a long time that noises/vibrations bring worms to the surface. The only news here is that they're imitating the sounds created by moles (if that's really even true).
Even when I repot a plant in the garden and take it out of it's old pot and crumble the old soil mix away from it's roots the bits of soil falling off hit the floor and make worms come up because of the tapping sound of small objects hitting the floor presumably being much like the sound of rain hitting the floor.
I know this because the plants I repot are usually cacti and with the spikes resting on the floor and the rootball up in the air the worms have at times been dumb enough to come up underneath the cacti and ended up getting themself impaled on the spikes. I don't particularly like worms, especially ones I have to extract cactus spines from.
Thumpers have been known to work as well... (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thumper_(Dune)#T)
...and potential legal problems with imitating money?
Just get a couple of adds... umm.. I mean articles... in the papers about lava bringing up diamonds and gold and oil and iPods to the surface.
At the same time take out another series of adds stating you will pay a premium for freshly hand-squeezed lava juice.
Follow that up with a series of adds about benefits of fresh lava to sex life and penis size.
Finally, take out another batch of adds for books and DVDs about the best ways and locations for lava collecting. Make those over the weekend and sell them for $29.99.
Once you get that thin rolling, hire someone else to keep the flow, get all your "data" about the booming "lava market" into a powerpoint presentation and find some investors.
Chanel their investments into personal accounts on Cayman Islands, personal bodyguards and campaign donations.
Oh yeah...
Profit.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Yes, 2 metal rods pushed 6 inches deep about 2 to 3 feet apart and connected to a fully charged car battery usually does the trick. They surface pretty quick.
into the ground and hit it a few times (softly) to get the same effect. This is old knowledge, so now suddenly a scientific paper comes out and makes this Nerd News ? Then I know a few more:
Next week in the headlines:
* water drains the other way if you're in Australia
* put a magnet near a needle and you can make a compass !
* your coffee will be warmer if you put in the milk *before* you walk to the door and return to drink it
Any more lessons ? Please add them to my post, I think we all have few.
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
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
Less noise than a Thumper, smaller worms than Arrakis. Lame.
Fresh Gagh
Round here the seagulls pound the grass with their feet to attract worms
If fishermen were doing this illegally, would they be sent to Pound-You-In-The-Grass prison ?
Squirrel!
Ancient pagan religious ritual. The stake is obviously a phallic symbol. Somehow it survived among simple fisherman down to this day.
The early worm deserves the bird...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
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?