…they estimated a decline in earthworm abundance of between 33% and 41% in the last quarter of a century, the period for which the best data was available…
Dr Matt Shardlow, of the charity Buglife, said earthworms were essential to healthy soils and productive ecosystems and the decline in UK earthworm populations – at a rate of about 15% per decade since 1960 – was “deeply alarming”.
“Devastated earthworm populations in arable soils are to be expected due to the widespread use of toxic pesticides,” he said. “But declines in broadleaved woodlands and pasture indicate that climate change and growing levels of animal-wormer pollution in soils are likely to be also driving this insidious facet of biodiversity loss.”
This always gets called “biodiversity loss”, but if you lose key species, you can have ecological collapse. For example, in the oceans, the most likely future scenario is that jellyfish become the dominant species.
Notice that we don’t really know how long this has been going on, and how deep it is. The “normal” gets set to people’s childhood, as with bug splat. For those too young to remember, it used to be that insects were so thick in the air in rural and wilderness areas that when you drove through them your windscreen would be covered with their dead bodies.
Not anymore.
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The Grand Banks off Newfoundland were once so rich with fish that you’d drop in a bucket and it would come up full. The Dodo was so prolific that flocks would literally blot out the sun. My Uncle Jack told me that when he was a youth in the 20s and 30s in Northwest BC, he would take a line and an earthworm just out of the town of Prince George, and have a salmon in 10 minutes or less. Another Uncle, who had a small trawler, told me similar stories of decline, back in the 80s.
As with climate change, we’re screwing with systems we don’t really understand, but we do know that we are reliant on their proper functioning for food, water and breathable air. Rain water is no longer safe to drink, for the first time in human history. Major aquifers are drying up and being permanently damaged and many of them are polluted.
The scale of the damage we are doing the environment is staggering, and we are, like it or not, part of the environment. We understand so little that we can’t even create a close environment capable of supporting life more advanced than slimes. If we fuck this up, we can make it so bad we won’t know how to fix it.
And earthworms, as every gardener knows, are gold for soil fertility.
Amazing.
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