Jumping Worms That Destroy Soil Spotted In Connecticut

CONNECTICUT — Step aside, stink bug. Jump off, giant parachuting spider. ticks.

There's a new Bad Bug flexing in Connecticut.

In the latest edition of the state's ongoing game of entomological "Can You Top This?," several species of Asian jumping worms have been introduced to 34 U.S. states, including Connecticut. The critters can chew away nutrients from soil and flip themselves up to a foot off of the ground, scientists said.

Let that sink in.

Jumping worms have been on the radar of gardeners, scientists, and landscapers in the Nutmeg State for at least a decade, according to The Connecticut Gardener website.

By 2015, the buggers were known to be in two of Connecticut’s eight counties, but believed to be limited to golf courses, greenhouses and vermi-composting systems.

Now they have worked their way into the state's woodlands, and that's a problem. You have probably heard that worms are good for gardens, leaving the soil better than when they wriggled in. Asian jumping worms — also called Alabama jumpers, Jersey wrigglers, wood eel, crazy worms, snake worms and crazy snake worms — are the exception.

Their common names are descriptive of “the way they thrash around,” USDA Forest Service soil scientist Mac Callaham said in a post last month on the agency’s website.

Beneficial earthworms aerate the soil and help prep it for growth. But once jumping worms have had their way with your dirt, it will have the consistency of coffee grounds — and be about as useful for growing things as the dredges from the morning pot of joe.

Other earthworms also “get elbowed out of the way” by this invasive Asian species, Donald Lewis, an Iowa State University entomology professor, told news station KCCI in Des Moines. The jumping earthworms have spread to 12 counties in Iowa.

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Populations of Amynthas agrestis grow quickly through a couple of generations a season. Like other worms, they’re hermaphrodites, meaning they have both male and female reproductive organs, but with a distinction: Jumping worms reproduce on their own, according to the extension service at Iowa State.

Jumping worms are hardcore. Just how hardcore are jumping worms?

They Engineer Their Own Ecosystems

Jumping worms are wreaking havoc with soil and, ultimately, the circle of life, Callaham told Sarah Farmer, a science writer for the Forest Service’s Southern Research Station in Asheville, North Carolina.

Jumping worms expend a lot of energy, which they fuel by eating everything in their path. That includes leaf litter, the first layer of soil on the forest floor — home to not only many unseen tiny creatures but also an important source of nutrients plants need to sprout and grow.

All earthworms feed on leaf litter, but jumping worms are “voracious,” Callaham said.

“Soil is the foundation of life — and Asian jumping worms change that,” the soil scientist continued. “In fact, earthworms can have such huge impacts that they’re able to actually engineer the ecosystems around them.”

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It’s a conundrum for scientists, who say they need to learn more about the ecology of jumping worms before prescribing a management plan. The intelligence on them so far by about two dozen scientists was collected last year in a research paper detailing the second wave of jumping worm infestation in North America.

“We cannot really manage them once they are here,” Andrea Davalos, an assistant professor of biology at State University of New York-Cortland and one of the authors of the research paper, told Upstate New York.

“There’s no appropriate method to get rid of them,” said Davalos, who also is a member of New York’s Jumping Worm Outreach, Research & Management collaborative.

What Davalos and others have found in New York is that while jumping worms are widespread from Long Island to Ontario, Canada, their colonies are “very patchy.” A colony of up to 30 jumping worms can live in a 2.6-square-foot garden plot, but a similarly sized space nearby may have none.

'Forestry-Wise, It's Disastrous'

Maine state horticulturalist Gary Fish told NECN, an NBC affiliate serving the Northeast, said his office has seen the number of reports of jumping worms increasing over the past five years and that their spread has been “a problem across the whole Northeast.”

“Forestry-wise,” he told NECN, “I would say it’s disastrous.”

Of particular risk, he said, are the maple trees in Vermont used to make syrup, and others used for wood products such as ash.

Similar stories emerge elsewhere across the country.

“Because of their ability to clone themselves, just one jumping worm can start a population, which makes them a different species to manage,” Ryan Hueffmeier, an ecologist, environmentalist and professor in University Of Minnesota Duluth’s College of Education and Human Service Professions, told KSMP, a Fox News affiliate in Eden Prairie, Minnesota.

How to Beat the Worms

They may be creatures out of nightmare, but they're not unbeatable.

Although there are no well-established proven methods for control or pesticides registered for use against jumping worms.

While not exactly jumping worm kryptonite, mustard is a household product which can be used to flush the critters out of the soil, according to Dr. Gale Ridge, an expert in insect morphology, behavior and ecology with the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station.

Mix a third of a cup of ground yellow mustard seed into one gallon of water and pour half of the liquid slowly over a one square foot of the soil you want to test. It irritates the worms and they surface, making detection and hand-picking easier.

Jumping worms live mostly in the top 2 inches of the soil. By rototilling before May 30 but after May 15 in Connecticut many juvenile worms can be killed, Ridge explained in an email. Tilling in October is ineffective, because cocoons have already been produced.

with Patch Editor Beth Dalbey