Wiggle Room: Incorporating Earthworms into Fiction Stories

Imagine a creature so unassuming, yet so vital, that its very existence shapes the foundation of life as we know it. I give you the earthworm. Often overlooked and underestimated, these tiny characters in the soil hold immense potential for captivating fiction. From their ecological significance as silent heroes of nature to survival, earthworms can add unexpected layers to storytelling. In this episode, we’ll dive into how these humble creatures can wiggle their way into the narrative tapestry of fiction, weaving stories that leave your readers captivated. 

Transcript

Imagine a creature so unassuming, yet so vital, that its very existence shapes the foundation of life as we know it. I give you the earthworm. Often overlooked and underestimated, these tiny characters in the soil hold immense potential for captivating fiction. From their ecological significance as silent heroes of nature to survival, earthworms can add unexpected layers to storytelling. In this episode, we’ll dive into how these humble creatures can wiggle their way into the narrative tapestry of fiction, weaving stories that leave your readers captivated. 

Welcome to Writing Rural with Alley, the fiction writer’s weekly inspiration station for rural life and lifestyles, from historical to post-apocalyptic, helping you bring your rural stories to life! I’m Alley, and this is episode #104, Wiggle Room: Incorporating Earthworms into Fiction Stories. Stick around to the end to find out all the ways things could possibly go wrong in your story. Now, let’s get into this.

Earthworms are found on every continent except Antarctica. They play a pivotal role in the production of crops around the world, among many other uses in rural life, giving you a plethora of ways you can work these little guys into your stories. I know, much to the dismay of every little girl who was chased around the playground with someone dangling a worm at them. (I’m just going to pretend I wasn’t one of the little snotheads who were chasing the other girls around with them.) Let’s start with the basics of what they are good for, that isn’t a backstory of childhood torment. 

Practical uses: 

* Garden: They help with soil aeration, and fertilization.

* Compost: They are essential in the breakdown of organic waste, transforming it into worm poop, referred to as black gold by many gardeners. 

* Eating: Survival situations are the most likely, but some cultures eat them. 

* Feed for chickens: Chickens will grab the worm and run from the other chickens who try to steal it. It literally looks like a chicken version of football, where the goal is to get three seconds to swallow the worm before someone steals it. 

* Bird bait: The early bird gets the worm, is not just a saying. Leaving worms out on something that isn’t dirt (because they will crawl into the dirt) can lore in birds that your character might be hunting. 

* Dogs and cats eat them: I have seen both happen often even if they are well-fed animals. 

* Fish bait: This is one I hated as a kid because it meant trout lines and bobbins. Which means you get to stare at a line for hours and hope for a fish to bite. Side note: Trout lines are for catfish, and I don’t know where the name comes from. 

The most common on that list is gardening. With earthworms in the garden, the soil will not compact as much, the water will have an easier time absorbing into the dirt, and will not run off as quickly. Not to mention all the nutrients that worms will add to the garden. These include nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium, and humic acid. Humic acid is basically a compound that makes it easier for plants to absorb water and nutrients. 

Earthworms are great for compost as they eat and breakdown organic matter such as scraps, leaves, and lawn clippings. Although please don’t let your gardener character put lawn clippings in the compost, unless they want to grow weeds. All those grass seeds will sprout in the garden if they do that. Which would be a great way to get some petty revenge between rose gardeners, or mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, or even love rivals. 

There are things worms love and hate in the compost. Remember that they need smaller chunks or they have to wait for it to decompose some first. 

In the compost worms love: 

* Fruit peelings and vegetable scraps

* Coffee grounds 

* Tea bags (Minus the bag) 

* Bread

* Rice (cooked, not dry) 

* Leaves 

* Poop from rabbit, cow, goat, chicken, etc. 

* Cardboard and paper 

* Straw 

* Untreated sawdust 

* Egg shells 

Worms hate: 

* Oils (It can suffocate them) 

* Onions and garlic 

* Spicy food scraps 

* Dairy anything 

* Meat (They don’t like competing with magots) 

I think fish bait and animal food are fairly self explanatory, but did you know people can eat earthworms, and it is common in real life survival stories all around the world? Yep, and if you listened to episode 101- Good Intentions Gone Wrong: When Character’s Get Well-Meaning but Misleading Survival Advice, you will know I have personally eaten earthworms. I’ll give you a second to get the “Ew, gross,” said. 

Bluntly put raw earthworm, tastes like slimy dirt, and is just as gross as it sounds. Now, we also stuck them on tiny sticks and roasted them over an open fire. When done like this and dipped in catsup, I could pretend it was a French fry. However, if it has been cleaned and roasted, it’s not bad, but is not really good either. Kind of a crunchy bland with slight dirt tang to it. Almost like if you had dirty hands and ate a sandwich, you would have dirt on the sandwich. 

Now your character will want to clean the worm out, so to speak, before eating or cooking it. We always laid them out and used our finger to squash all the poop out of the back end. Start at one end and squash to the other. Likely two or three times to be sure they get it all. 

A web search says to let them eat leaves in a box for 12 hours so they can get anything toxic out of their system first. Yeah, here is the thing, if your character is in a survival situation, they are hungry now. More importantly, who carries a box around just in case they are in a survival situation so they can eat worm? That is exactly no one! 

Now there are some good reasons not to eat them raw, and to clean and cook earthworms. First is they can carry E. Coli. The symptoms usually happen between two and eight days after exposure, and can clear up in a week. However, there can also be complications, and your character could need medical help. 

Signs and symptoms of E. Coli are: 

* Fatigue

* Muscle aches 

*Chills 

* Diarrhea

* Abdominal pain and cramping

* Nausea and vomiting

* Low grade fever 

Symptoms that need medical treatment are: 

* Bloody stools

* High fever

* Dehydration (Likely caused by diarrhea and vomiting)

I would like to point out in a survival situation, any of these things could make things worse, and in a survival scenario, this could easily be deadly. 

Next up are parasites. Yep, your worm can have worms. These include, pin worm, heart worms, and round worms. All things that can wreak havoc on the human body. 

Signs and symptoms of parasitic worms in humans are: 

* Nausea and vomiting

* Loss of apatite

* Weight loss

* Abdominal pain and cramping

* Diarrhea 

* Fatigue 

* Anemia 

* Worms in stools (AKA their poop) 

You know that list sounds a whole lot like the one for E. Coli, which is why it can be so hard to tell what it is without a doctor’s help. 

Lastly, earthworms can eat and contain high levels of heavy metals or other toxins in the soil. This can be a big deal if they are near a lead mine. It could also be a big deal after an apocalypse. If there were radiation, they could contain it. If everything just stopped one day, there could be chemicals from a factory that seep into the soil as the containers age and start to leek. This is one you can get creative with. 

Other apocalyptic ideas are that worms could be a solution to toxins in the soil, or other gardening issues. They could be used to bring nutrients back to barren soils. This could help not only humans but to regrow lost animal habitats. 

And let’s not forget my kids favorite syfi creature, the sand worm! At least I am pretty sure that is what the first stage of life the tremors are in the tremors series. Although there are stories of Mongolian death worms that lived in the desert, so this is not a new story. 

There are is also the option of alien worms that look like earth worms, but that is unlikely to be in a rural setting, but I won’t say it isn’t possible, just unlikely. 

It’s far more likely that earthworms will help solve a mystery. Perhaps they help with the timeframe of a death. There is also the possibility that they die off because of some chemical someone has been dumping. Perhaps there is a huge boom, and they learn of growth hormones the bad guys are making. Or bad government is making. 

With that idea, let’s cover basic worm facts. There are over 2,700 types of earthworms in the world. In ideal habitats, worms can live between four to eight years. Depending on the species of earthworm, they can lay between one and a dozen eggs at a time. They will lay eggs 20 to 40 times a year. That means that in their lifetime, a single worm can have hundreds to thousands of babies. 

Earthworms live in every continent except Antartica. They thrive in places that have organic matter for them to eat. This includes forests, grasslands, gardens, compost piles, river banks including the areas prone to flooding, and agricultural land. 

There are places that are not conductive to their survival. Deserts are hot and dry. An earthworm would not do well there. Areas with permafrost. They are too cold and many lack the organic matter needed for them to survive. Also, certain altitudes can be too rocky, or nutrients poor for earthworms. Which is interesting to me, as I have lived in places so rocky it will take you 20 minutes to dig a one foot hole. I used to swear we grew rocks there, and yet there was a huge worm population. Perhaps because it was a forested area, and they had plenty of organic matter to eat. I don’t know. 

Now let’s talk about how to dig up worm.s They can be found in puddles, as almost every little kid can tell you. When I was young, we would go to the river and dig them out of the ground about 30 feet from the water, where the ground was still damp. 

I can still remember every single time we went, my dad would tell us a story. A young man decided to come down to the river to dig up worms because it’s what the fishers said they did. He dug up a nest of worms, and as he was carrying them out, one of the guys asked if he got any. He said yes, but they kept biting him. That confused everyone, so they asked to see the worms. He held up a hand full of newly hatched copperhead snakes. They couldn’t get the man to the hospital fast enough to save him. He would always finish with, “So remember, if you find a worm with a mouth, it’s not a worm, it’s a snake.” 

Worms can also be found under things. Under fallen logs or large stones are good places to look. We used to keep old rugs, or even mattresses outside on the ground and would hose them down with water from time to time, and you could always find worms under them. You could often find snakes under them, so be careful. 

There is also a thing called worm grunting. There are two ways to do this. Both are done with sticks about two inches or more in diameter. One is with a stick with grooves cut into it so it looks and sounds like a washing board, and the second is with a stick and a large metal file. An area is cleared of grass or leaves, and the stick is placed into the ground several inches to a foot. For the grooved stick, a second stick is rubbed up and down it to make a sound. If using the file, it is rubbed across the top of the stick, making a deep grunting or groaning type of sound. 

This can work, but not nearly as quickly as the internet makes it out to. It can take several minutes to work. Some people believe it mimics rain and the worms come up for that, and other say it mimics moles. I don’t know what the correct one is, but if I ever learn how to speak worm, I’ll ask. 

Fun fact: The longest earthworm ever found was 22 feet (6.7 meters). 

One quick reminder before we get to all the ways things could go wrong in your story. To help others find this content, pop on over to Apple podcasts and leave me a review. Or if you are watching on YouTube, drop me a comment and say hello, or ask a question. This is the best way to help others find my content. 

Now, for everyone’s favorite part, what could possibly go wrong in your story? 

Likely to go wrong: Your character is in the boy scouts and cooks worms to eat. He has trouble eating them as he didn’t clean them and they taste like dirt. 

Likely to go wrong: Your character wants to show off worm calling to his friends because he saw it on the internet. He doesn’t realize it takes a few minutes and quits too soon. His friends make fun of him, calling him worm man. 

Possible to go wrong: Your character’s dog eats worms near an old mine. Unknowingly, the dog gets led poisoning from the high amount of lead in the worm. 

Possible to go wrong: Your character is in a survival situation and starving. They decide to try eating worms raw, and gag as they have a mouth full of slimy dirt. 

Unlikely to go wrong: Your character’s pet loves to eat earthworms. They unknowingly get round worms. 

Unlikely to go wrong: Your characters in a survival situation and eats a worm raw. They unknowingly ingested parasites. 

Improbable but still technically in the realm of possibilities: Your character is in a survival situation and eats raw worms to survive. A few days later, they start vomiting and having bloody stools. If they don’t find help quickly, this could be deadly. 

Improbable but still technically in the realm of possibilities: Your characters are in a desert and giant sand worms see them as food. 

Thanks for listening! Until next time, happy wordsmithing.