Driloleirus americanus (Giant Palouse Earthworm)

[Melanie]

University of Idaho graduate student Yaniria Sanchez-de Leon is apparently the first person in nearly two decades to find a specimen of the giant Palouse earthworm.



^{The large, white worm at the top is the giant Palouse earthworm, Driloleirus americanus. Below is the southern worm or Aporrectodea trapezoides, which is considered an introduced species. (Photo Credit: Yaniria Sanchez-de Leon/University of Idaho (c) 2005)}

The white, lily-scented denizen of the region’s fertile, deep soils reportedly can grow to 3 feet long. The rolling hills of the Palouse sprawl across an estimated 2 million acres of north central Idaho and southeastern Washington.

Sanchez-de Leon collected the 6-inch white worm from a remnant of Palouse prairie while studying earthworm populations and carbon dynamics in native prairie and retired farmland.

Northwest earthworm expert William M Fender-Westwind confirmed the identification of the worm Sanchez-de Leon found last May. His confirmation supported her initial identification and another by earthworm experts gathered for a workshop in her native Puerto Rico in November.

“This is exciting,” said James B. “Ding” Johnson, UI Plant, Soil and Entomological Sciences Department head. “By earthworm standards, they’re pretty cool.”

“It’s good news that this rare and interesting species is still with us,” Johnson said. He and graduate student Paul Johnson are believed to be the last scientists to document a sighting of the worm.

In 1988, they found several worms in a forest clearing on nearby Moscow Mountain while rolling back moss in search of the pill beetles he studied. They sent two specimens to Portland, Ore.-based Fender-Westwind for confirmation.

Early observers reported the giant Palouse earthworms could grow 2- to 3 feet long, big but modest compared to relatives from Australia that can reach 10 feet long.

Sanchez-de Leon discovered the worm last spring while digging the last of five pits in the Washington State University’s Smoot Hill Ecological Preserve near Palouse, Wash.

To collect samples, she dug five small pits, each about 10 inches square and 12 inches deep. While digging the day’s last pit, she noticed the flash of white in soil about 4 inches deep – and came up with part of the worm. Another shovelful held the rest.

“I noticed it immediately,” she said. “It’s very white and the anterior part is pink near the mouth.” Two UI environmental science students, Katherine Smetak and Juan F. Villa-Romero, joined her on the collecting trip.

Sanchez-de Leon is studying at the University of Idaho through the National Science Foundation’s Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship program. As part of the joint program with Costa Rica’s Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center, she studied earthworm abundance in a coffee plantation during a summer internship there.

Although early reports say the worms have a lily-like scent when handled, neither Johnson nor Sanchez recalled detecting it.

Jodi Johnson-Maynard, UI assistant professor of soil and water management, said relocating the giant Palouse earthworm may offer another opportunity to learn more about its behavior and ecology.

Scientists suspect more than a century of intensive cultivation of the Palouse for wheat and other crops triggered the white worm’s rarity. Johnson-Maynard said another possibility is that the worm was always rare.

The giant Palouse earthworm might also be suffering from competition with European earthworms that reached the area with settlers as stowaways on plants.

“So it’s an incredibly interesting find and maybe it will allow us to say more about where and how it lives,” Johnson-Maynard said.

Three years of samples showed European earthworms live in far larger numbers in the prairie remnant, Sanchez-de Leon said. The largest numbers live in the farmland idled through long-term contracts under the federal Conservation Reserve Program.

Earthworms play important roles in soil health, transferring plant debris from the surface deeper in the soil and digging tunnels that allow air and water to penetrate.

Sanchez-de Leon said she plans to return to Smoot Hill this spring to search for the giant Palouse earthworm again. Johnson’s experience suggests they’re no easier to find the second time around.

“We went back a few years ago, about 15 of us from UI and WSU, and spent a rainy day looking in the exact same place but we didn’t find any,” he said.

[Melanie]

Palouse, Washington -- Pity the poor robin that latches onto one of these worms.

A yard long and as big around as a man's pinkie finger, the giant Palouse earthworm is albino-pale, can burrow 15 feet deep and smells like a lily.

The recent discovery of one of the scarce giants has energized entomologists and soil scientists, who fear it may be near extinction.

"It was very exciting. Just to find something we thought, perhaps, was gone is a great thing," University of Idaho soils scientist Jodi Johnson-Maynard said.

The native giant earthworms have been found by scientists only four times since the 1970s. None had been seen since the 1980s until Idaho graduate student Yaniria Sanchez-de Leon dug one up while studying other earthworm species in May 2005.

It wasn't until last January that worm experts confirmed she had found Driloleirus americanus, the giant Palouse earthworm.

"I wasn't looking specifically for it. I was hoping it was around," Sanchez de-Leon said.

Little is known about the giant worms: how many there are, where they live, how they behave, or why they are so scarce.

Scientists aren't even sure how big they get. Reports of 3-foot-long earthworms come from before the Palouse region of Eastern Washington was carpeted by wheat and other crops more than a century ago, Johnson-Maynard said.

Specimens found in modern times have been 18 inches or less. A giant worm in Australia, by comparison, can reach 10 feet.

Sanchez-de Leon thinks the 6-inch-long version she found - a little longer and fatter than a common nightcrawler earthworm - might be a young adult.

One reason so little is known about the giant earthworms is, well, they're worms.

Unlike the celebration touched off by last year's sighting in Arkansas of the ivory-billed woodpecker - a bird not seen in 60 years and thought to be extinct - the giant earthworm Sanchez-de Leon found last year already has been consigned to a jar of formaldehyde.

"Realistically, the giant Palouse earthworm is a lot less charismatic than a giant woodpecker," said James "Ding" Johnson, head of the University of Idaho's Department of Plant, Soil and Entomology Sciences. Johnson, himself, found several of the giant earthworms during graduate studies in the late 1980s.

There is urgency to find more Palouse giants because earthworms play an important part in the health of soil and plants, the scientists said.

"Earthworms are considered nature's tillers. They're extremely important for soil quality and from the standpoint of managing to grow plants better," said Ann Kennedy, a Washington State University soil scientist and veteran of several unsuccessful giant Palouse earthworm expeditions.

"It's one of a whole group of macrofauna that burrow and move organic matter from the surface down to deeper depths," Kennedy said. "It's amazing how far down you can find matter."

Sanchez-de Leon spent two years digging in WSU's Smoot Hill Ecological Reserve north of Pullman, about 65 miles south of Spokane - where the giant earthworm had been found previously.

The 800-acre reserve is thought to be one of the last remaining segments of the 2 million-square-acre Palouse shrub-steppe prairie of north-central Idaho and southeastern Washington.

The Palouse region was formed from ashfalls from Cascade Mountain volcanic eruptions. The wind-blown loess is hundreds of feet deep in places and supports a carpet of wheat on rolling hillsides.

The Palouse-area scientists think the earthworm's length and feeding habits might contribute to its scarcity.

These earthworms don't regenerate when cut by plows and tillage disturbs the layer of surface vegetation where they eat, the scientists think.

Other factors could be changes to their native habitat, or competition from other species of earthworms brought West by settlers, the Idaho and WSU scientists said.

Because the giant worms may "hibernate" deep underground until surface conditions are just right, it is not known how many there are, Kennedy said.

"The historic records lack enough precision for us to know how common they were before the Palouse was tilled. There are early oral reports of seeing these giant worms," Johnson said.

Unlike the giant sand worms of "Dune," the science-fiction work made into a movie in 1984, or the man-eating underground dwellers of 1990s movie "Tremors," the giant Palouse worms appear to eat only vegetation and an occasional insect.

That lily scent the worms are reported to give off is thought to be a defense mechanism, Johnson and others said.

European worms, which were brought West by settlers, may have crowded out the native worms, Johnson said.

"We're not exactly sure why they're going extinct," Johnson said. "Apparently, the natives did not evolve with tillage, with the plants we've introduced. We've changed their ecosystem and introduced a competitor."

Kennedy said scientists from Idaho and Washington State - land grant universities eight miles apart in the heart of the Palouse - will continue to look for the giant worm that has proved to be as elusive as another Northwest legend.

"It is kind of like a Bigfoot thing, but that's OK," Kennedy said. "Lately, worms are the big thing. People used to think they were kind of icky and now there kind of neat to talk about."

[Melanie]

Group out to save legendary giant worm from extinction

Nicholas K. Geranios
Associated Press
Sept. 8, 2006 09:05 AM

SPOKANE, Wash. - It's 3 feet long, pinkish in color, smells like a lily and must be saved from extinction, conservationists said in asking the federal government to protect the Giant Palouse Earthworm under the Endangered Species Act.

Long thought extinct, the worm was rediscovered in the past year, found to occupy tiny swatches of the heavily farmed Palouse region along the Washington-Idaho border.

"This worm is the stuff that legends and fairy tales are made of," worm supporter Steve Paulson declared Thursday. "What kid wouldn't want to play with a 3-foot-long, lily-smelling, soft pink worm that spits?"


The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has not yet seen the petition regarding Driloleirus americanus, agency spokesman Tom Buckley said in Spokane.

Normally when the agency gets a request, it will consider whether an emergency listing is needed. Then it will do a 90-day review to determine if the issue warrants additional study, Buckley said.

If it deserves more study, there will be a year-long review to decide if endangered species protection is needed, Buckley said.

"When you consider how the Palouse prairie has been utilized, with all the agriculture down there, how anything like that survived the effects of agriculture is beyond me," Buckley said.

He can also see other reasons the worm might need protection.

"If you are a fisherman, it might be a bonanza if you found something like that," Buckley said.

The petition was sent by certified letter on Aug. 30 to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, a former Idaho governor, said Paulson, an author of the petition who lives in Lenore, Idaho.

It's too soon to know if anyone will object to the listing, or what lands might be considered critical habitat, Paulson said. He suspected that only lands that have not been developed, which represent only a fraction of 1 percent of the Palouse prairie, would be preserved as habitat.

The earthworm is native to the deep soils of the Palouse, which were built up by millions of years of volcanic ash and are some of the richest farmland on Earth. Little is known about the giant worms: how many there are, where they live, how they behave, or why they are so scarce.

The worm was first found in 1897, and the species has always been elusive. It can burrow down 15 feet. There have been only three reported sightings since 1987.

The most recent was on May 27, 2005, when a graduate student from the University of Idaho, Yaniria Sanchez-de Leon, unearthed one specimen.

The Giant Palouse Earthworm is described as the largest and longest-lived earthworm on this continent. It reportedly gives off a peculiar flowery smell when handled, and can spit at attackers, Paulson said.

Groups signing the petition are the Palouse Prairie Foundation, Palouse Audubon Society and the Friends of the Clearwater.

Locals are belatedly trying to save the last remnants of the undeveloped Palouse prairie, and the earthworm could play a major role in that.

"Listing the Giant Palouse Earthworm may be the only salvation for the Palouse Prairie," said O. Lynne Nelson, who signed the petition. ---

On the Web

palouseprairie.org/invertebrates/palouseworm.html

[Melanie]

COLFAX, Wash. (UPI) — Naturalists are searching southwest Washington state for the giant Palouse earthworm in an effort to get the species on the endangered list.

The worms grow up to 3 feet long. But they are surprisingly difficult to find for a large worm, The Seattle Times reported Tuesday.

The Palouse Prairie Foundation applied for an endangered species listing recently. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service rejected the petition on the grounds that there is no proof they are endangered.

Very little is known about the worms, including whether they are extinct, since only four specimens have been recorded in 30 years. Most scientists believe that the worms prefer prairie habitat but there is at least one 19th-century report of worms found in a forest.

Jodi Johnson-Maynard of the University of Idaho said that scientists are trying new methods to bring the worms to the surface. They include a device that sends a mild electrical shock into the earth, flooding burrows with a mild solution of hot mustard and vinegar and sending vibrations into the ground.

The traditional worm-hunting tool, a tile spade, has its problems, although Johnson-Maynard said the handle is useful for scaring off rattlesnakes. Two years ago, a graduate student accidentally cut a Palouse earthworm in two with a spade.

Copyright © 2007 by United Press International

[Melanie]

If it's a giant, why is it hard to find?

By Sandi Doughton
MCT

Published on: 11/09/07

COLFAX, Wash. — When searching for one of North America's most elusive creatures, it helps to have state-of-the-art equipment, jokes Jodi Johnson-Maynard.

The University of Idaho soil scientist is walking up a gentle hill in southeast Washington, on a quest for the giant Palouse earthworm. In her hand is a tile spade, a narrow shovel that's about as high-tech as it gets in the worm-hunting business.

"It's our basic tool," Johnson-Maynard says, leaning on the spade like a walking stick. The long handle is great for chasing away rattlesnakes, she says, and the sharp edges slice through turf.


Unfortunately, they also make mincemeat of worms. Two years ago, a graduate student unearthed one of the rare wigglers on this same hill, but accidentally cut it in two.

"We need better methods to look for these worms," Johnson-Maynard says.

That's especially true now that conservationists are seeking endangered-species protection for the pinkish-white worms, which may grow to 3 feet long and were once abundant in the deep soils of the Palouse. Only four sightings have been confirmed in the past 30 years, and experts had feared the species was extinct.

Last month, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service rejected a petition filed by the Palouse Prairie Foundation, Friends of the Clearwater and others, saying too little is known about the worm to declare it endangered. But last week, the conservationists filed notice that they will sue to force the federal agency to reconsider and launch a major review of the species' status.

"It's an ethical decision," said Steve Paulson, the Idaho environmentalist who is leading the push for protection. "I don't think we should be causing these creatures to go extinct."

If the worm is listed, its remaining habitat must be protected.

Since no one is even sure what habitat the worm favors, there's clearly a need for more study — which means being able to find the creatures, Johnson-Maynard says. Her early November expedition is aimed at testing one alternative to the shovel: saturating the ground around a worm burrow with a dilute solution of hot mustard and vinegar.

"The hope is that it irritates the worms and drives them up to the surface," she says, passing through thickets of chokecherry and wild rose that dot this 40-acre remnant of native grassland. The 3,000-foot hill, part of a Washington State University biological reserve, rises like an island in a sea of wheat fields.

Less than 1 percent of the wild Palouse prairie remains; biologists suspect the giant worms have likely fallen victim to habitat loss, churning plow blades and competition from the night crawlers and other non-native species that now dominate the region.

Johnson-Maynard drops her pack, slips off her parka and begins to dig. She kneels by the hole and breaks apart clods with her hand, searching for tunnels left behind as earthworms cruise through the soil, eating fungi and leaf litter.

"Here's a burrow," she says, pointing to a barely discernible track among the roots, pebbles and dirt. "It's pretty subtle, but when you look at soil a lot, these things just jump out at you."

With $25,000 from the Idaho Fish and Game Department, Johnson-Maynard will try several worm-hunting tools in the coming months. Washington's Department of Fish and Wildlife also is interested in sponsoring worm studies, but hasn't put up any money yet.

"Finding earthworms is hard work," Johnson-Maynard says, scanning the buff-colored landscape for a promising spot. Early road crews reported giant earthworm burrows extending up to 15 feet underground. While naturalists in the late-1800s said the worms favored prairie, at least one sighting in the 1980s was in forestland.

With so little information on the species' behavior and preferences, going out armed only with a shovel is like sticking a fork into a haystack and hoping to pull out a needle, she says.

Some commercial worm hunters report success with electroshocking: sinking metal rods into the ground, then using batteries to generate a weak current that sends the worms to the surface. Johnson-Maynard has recruited electrical engineers to help her rig a similar system.

She's also keen to try DNA testing on the mucus worms leave behind in burrows, to help identify areas frequented by giant Palouse earthworms. It may be possible to train dogs to sniff out the worms, because some reports claim they spit lily-scented mucus when disturbed. (The scientific name, Driloleirus americanus, means lily-smelling American worm.)

Johnson-Maynard is even open to the idea of "worm grunting": rubbing a metal bar against wooden stakes in the ground to create vibrations that cause worms to flee their burrows.

[Melanie]

Search Continues Search For Elusive Giant Earthworms

Posted on: Sunday, 12 July 2009, 13:05 CDT

Scientists and researchers are scouring the Palouse region from eastern Washington into the Idaho panhandle in hopes of finding more of the dwindling giant Palouse earthworms, The Associated Press reported.

The almost elusive worm is said to secrete a lily-like smell when handled, spit at predators, and live in burrows 15 feet deep. There have been only a handful of sightings.

Even though there has been little research done on the Palouse worm, conservationists are asking the Obama administration to protect it as an endangered species.

Jodi Johnson-Maynard, a University of Idaho professor who is leading the search for the worm, presented a glass tube containing the preserved remains of a fat, milky-white worm that one of her graduate students found in 2005—the only confirmed example of the species.

Documented collections of the species, known locally as GPE, have occurred only in 1978, 1988, 1990 and 2005. The specimen found by Johnson-Maynard’s team is only about 6 inches long, well short of the 3 feet that early observers of the worms described in the late 1890s.

Johnson-Maynard’s researchers are working at a university research farm this summer using three different methods to try and find a living worm.

The simplest method involves just digging a hole and sifting the soil through a strainer, looking for any worms that can be studied, while the other methods are a little more involved.

One employs old-fashioned chemical warfare, pouring a liquid solution of vinegar and mustard onto the ground, irritating worms until they come to the surface. But the newest and latest method uses electricity to shock worms to the surface.

Joanna Blaszczak, a student at Cornell who is spending her summer working to find the worm alongside Shan Xu, a graduate student from Chengdu, China, and support scientist Karl Umiker, said the electro shocker is pretty cool.

The 3-foot-long metal rods are driven into the ground in small circles and then connected to batteries. They deliver up to 480 volts, meaning it could potentially fry a specimen and is dangerous to touch.

"I'm kind of bummed we haven't seen anything yet," Umiker said.

An 1897 article in The American Naturalist by Frank Smith said the GPE was described as common in the Palouse during that era. But massive agricultural development soon consumed nearly all of the unique Palouse Prairie and appeared to deal a fatal blow to the worm.

Before Idaho graduate student Yaniria Sanchez-de Leon stuck a shovel into the ground in 2005 to collect a soil sample and found the worm that now is in the tube in Johnson-Maynard's office, the mythical earth-dwellers were mostly considered extinct.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was asked to protect the worm as an endangered species, citing as proof the lack of sightings. But the agency said there simply was not enough scientific information to merit a listing.

A second request filed with the Obama administration claims to have more information on the worm and would make the GPE the only worm protected as an endangered species.

However, the agency isn't ready to comment on the petition, according to Doug Zimmer of the Fish and Wildlife Service in Seattle.

Zimmer said it was always good to see new information and good science on any species, but farmers are keeping a watchful eye on the research programs.

Dan Wood of the Washington State Farm Bureau said many farmers are concerned whether a listing is going to end up curtailing farming activities.

"I don't know if people plan to stop all farming for the possibility of a worm being somewhere," he said.

The giant Palouse earthworm is one of the few native species to North America, and has become quite popular with the public.

Johnson-Maynard said she has received calls from tourists who want to come to her office and be photographed with the specimen.

"A lot of people are curious about it," she said.

www.redorbit.com/news/science/1719348/search_continues_search_for_elusive_giant_earthworms/