Animal · Germany, France, United Kingdom
Common earthworm
Lumbricus terrestris — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The common earthworm eats dead leaves and turns them into soil. It has no eyes, no lungs and no bones, and it quietly rebuilds the ground that almost everything else on land grows in.
Picture credit: Donald Hobern (CC BY 2.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the common earthworm live?
Home: Damp soil in gardens, fields and woods across Europe, and now on most continents.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, the United States.
The short profile
Fully grown: 20–25 cm when stretched out. It weighs about 0 005 kilograms. On the menu: plants.
The story behind it
An earthworm breathes through its skin, which is why it must stay damp and why it comes to the surface when rain floods its tunnels. It has no eyes, only cells that can tell light from dark, and it works at night: it reaches out of its burrow, grips a fallen leaf and pulls it down to eat, which is how it got the English name nightcrawler. The tunnels go down two metres or more, and they let air and water into the ground while the worm's droppings mix leaf litter into the soil. Charles Darwin spent forty years watching earthworms and made them the subject of his very last book in 1881, working out how much soil they turn over. There is a twist. This worm belongs to western Europe. Northern forests in North America grew for ten thousand years after the ice age with no earthworms at all, and their plants depend on a thick layer of undecayed leaves. Where fishermen have tipped out leftover bait, the worms eat that layer away, and the forest floor changes. The same animal is a gardener at home and an invader abroad.
Find it on the globe
Common earthworm is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Why do earthworms come out when it rains?
A worm breathes through its skin and needs air in the soil. When rain fills its tunnels it comes up, and on wet ground it can also travel much further without drying out.
Do two halves of a cut worm live on?
No. That is a myth. Only the front half, the one with the mouth and the main organs, has any chance of healing, and only if the cut is far enough back. The rear half always dies.
How can an earthworm be a problem?
In northern North America there were no earthworms for ten thousand years after the ice age, and the forests there grew to depend on a deep layer of fallen leaves. Introduced worms eat that layer, and the plants that need it disappear.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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