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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."
Worm sign detected.
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.
Less noise than a Thumper, smaller worms than Arrakis. Lame.