Why Darwin admired the earthworm
nautil.us
nautil.us
Earthworms were all but wiped out in North America during the last ice age. The earthworms in North American soil today are almost all European. They're still spreading out and moving North in Canada.
Mindblowing Implication:
Prior to the introduction of European earthworms, dead leaves and other detritus just sat on the surface and accumulated until it was several feet deep in forests. Native plants often took advantage of this slowly decomposing source of nutrients. Earthworms break that detritus down into humus much faster, often starving native ground-cover plants and feeding invasive species. We're still watching a massive change to ecology, that started at the time of European contact, slowly unfold.
Only about 15% of NZ was covered by ice during the ice age.
The earthworm story highlights how nature simply evolves, and labeling things as native or invasive can mirror some societal attitudes. These words can carry some deep biases.
It's quite simple, actually.
If humans had any part in introducing a species to a given location which wasn't there before, it is invasive.
If humans had no part in the aforementioned process, it is native or at the very least natural.
Found an article which seem to mirror my understanding of the terms:
"Invasive: a species of plant or animal that outcompetes other species, causing damage to an ecosystem." https://lakes.grace.edu/native-non-native-invasive-species/
Can something that was only here 11,000's still qualify as native?
It is pretty amazing how things are still evolving.
Like the comment below about how the European Worms are still migrating, so the entire ecosystem is still adapting and changing.
So we are seeing evolution in progress, and maybe 10,000 years from now, someone will be arguing that the European worms are more 'native', and these new Mars worms brought back from the colonies are really invasive.
It's probably most useful to think of worms coming back in to the soil as another stage of progression, just like the stages of a forest returning after a fire, volcano or the like.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous#Rocks_and_coal:~....
My favorite earth worm fact is you have approximately one hundred million worms worth of energy in your body *(the sum of the stored energy in all your mitochondria).[1]
[1] https://ryanblakeley.net/p/metabolic-energy-of-a-worm-vs-a-h...
I'd expect that comparing the same kinds of energy the ratio would be more similar to a ratio of weights of the two organisms.
inside my body
Oh god no! If the average worm massed 10g, that's 10^9 grams of worm/anti-worm mix. Those 1000 metric tons of helminthic hitchikers would undergo total-annihilation to generate 9*10^22 Joules of energy, or 21.53 teratons of TNT.
Not only is that bigger than any nuclear bomb, it is likely way more than the yield of all nuclear bombs ever made rolled into one. This means it would be a Very Bad Day for both humans and worms on one or more continents. :P
(P.S.: Note that yield is only 1.7%-6% of estimates for the Chicxulub asteroid impact, so it is likely some worms will survive and maybe even some humans too if we don't botch handling the apocalypse.)
Edit: That whole article is riddled with errors. For example, he states 220mm^2 is 88% the surface area of a dime when in fact it is 87% of the surface area of one face of a dime.
(Mitochondria) "The electron and proton transfers of chemiosmotic energy coupling generate a transmembrane potential of 150–200 mV over the membrane (~5 nm across), giving a field strength of about 30 million volt per metre, equal to that discharged by a bolt of lightning."
Nick Lane and William Martin obviously don't talk about any directly obtainable energy. That number just can't be compared to the
"Available energy reserves (Ea)" "measured by quantifying the total lipid, protein, and carbohydrate content" from the
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6689315/
Also note: worms have mitochondria in their cells too.
Conclusion: "metabolism of a person and a worm" article is a good example of false claims which could be found on the internet, and the author, if he wants to help, should delete all the claims from it and put a note that what was on the page was false.
The human brain also uses a lot of energy, so it would probably be good to look into reducing its size.
God: *Creates worm.*
God: Welcome, worm.
Worm: Thanks for the “worm” welcome. Heheh
God: *Creates bird.*
Bird: Flips itself.
God: Creates cat.
And so on and so on.
(Wikipedia says: "Currently, over 6,000 species of terrestrial earthworms are named, as provided in a species name database, but the number of synonyms is unknown." Coincidentally, there are also about 6000 species of mammal.)