In the middle of Florida's Apalachicola National Forest, a strange, almost magical scene is unfolding. Sliding a metal strip over a wooden stake, a master summoner sends deep cracking sounds throughout the area.
And, as if in a trance, hundreds of insects begin to emerge from the soil. This is worm grunting, also known as worm charming or fiddling. It's a tradition that has been practiced for more than a century, but its inner workings were a mystery until recently.
Insects making a collective exodus underground seems especially incredible when you consider how vulnerable it makes them.
So why is surfacing worth the risk?
Over the years, people have proposed many conceptual hypotheses. One was that insects were somehow attracted to noise, like the mice of the medieval Pied Piper legend.
Well, that's fun, but how do bugs actually become magic?
Another hypothesis was that the hum of insects tickled their bodies,
so they emerged to relieve anxiety. Eccentric! But worm grunting shakes the surface of the earth.
If insects were avoiding vibrations, wouldn't they sink deeper instead?
Perhaps the most popular hypothesis was that insect droppings mimicked falling rain and the insects fled to avoid drowning. In 2008, entomologist Kenneth Catania tested this hypothesis, sequencing three mudflats and 300 individuals of a large species of earthworm found in the Florida Panhandle.
After an hour of rain, water had pooled on the surface, but only two muds emerged. The rest remained buried and healthy. So, unlike those containers, this hypothesis didn't just contain water.
Catania decided to find another line of inquiry. In 1881,
Charles Darwin published his last work, a best-seller that rivaled his most popular books of the time: "The Formation of Vegetable Moulds, Through the Action of Worms, on Their Habits."
Through observations." Yes, it was literally called—and it was the end of 40 years of slime investigation.
In it, Darwin notes that insects sometimes release their burrows when the ground trembles and mentions an interesting hypothesis: perhaps they flee because they believe they are being pursued by moles. . Catania himself had to work to test this hypothesis.
He found that eastern moles have amazing tracking abilities,
can eat their weight in insects every day, and are abundant in the Florida Panhandle.
When Catania released a mole in fields full of insects and soil, about 30% of the insects crawled to the surface in the first hour—a markedly different result from the control and rain trials.
And when he recorded the vibrations produced by worm grunters and burrowing moles, their frequencies overlapped considerably. it was. Over hundreds of thousands of years, these earthworms developed a behavior that helped them avoid a top predator.
In the upland, they were protected from moles,
which usually live underground. But then humans came along. And, ironically, we're not the only ones who benefit from this behavior. Herring gulls and wood turtles also sometimes drum their feet on the ground to call insects.
So why does this attitude persist?
Scientists believe that it is beneficial for a prey species to maintain its adaptation against a more frequent predator, even if it makes it more vulnerable to a rare predator. Many insects, for example, use flight to escape prey.
But painted redstarts take advantage of this:
they flash their colorful tails and wing feathers boldly to elicit this reaction, then grab the insects as they try to fly.
The prey species response seems to persist only because it is beneficial most of the time. For more than a century, humans in South America, Britain and elsewhere have been unwittingly exploiting the insect's escape response.
The current world record for "most insect attractive" was set in 2009 by a 10-year-old British girl. By twisting a fork in the ground and hitting it with a stick, he made 567 insects in just 30 minutes. Fascinating, indeed.
Comments
Post a Comment