This worm is a resident of the UK and yet just Look at the Size of it! That person`s hand can hardly contain its folded-up Enormity - at 15in (40cm), it is three times the size of a common-or-garden specimen.
How can this be? Global Warming… Aliens… No! – this worm lives on the beauteous Inner-Hebridean Isle of Rum where, abundant in wildlife though it be, the island has no moles, frogs, badgers… in fact hardly any evil-worm-eaters at all.
In this blissful otherworldly place, worms simply live long and prosper, becoming not only the biggest earthworms in the UK, but also the longest-living - up to ten years instead of two!
Worms are modest creatures and yet Charles Darwin wrote, "Of all animals, few have contributed so much to the development of the world as we know it, as these lowly creatures." (Surely food for deep thought).
It doesn`t seem much of a life though… incessant chomping on any old soil and casting it out as Something Beautiful (healthy and fertile); It has been estimated that nearly every particle of healthy top soil on earth has passed through earthworms at one stage or another. (earthwormsinfo.com).
So tread delicately out there.
One (perhaps the?) benefit of being an earthworm is that they don`t catch any diseases, teeming as they are with good and Mighty bacteria. Sadly, they`re also protein-packed and toothless, hence their countless predators.
Agonised by such thoughts, I always reinter worms unearthed in my gardening efforts, but it only takes the patter of rain to bring them hurtling back out to Breathe.
Or of a Fiendish Cunning seagull pretending...
(I thought he was just Happy when we first spotted him).
One Day, Seagull, all worms will be Anaconda-Sized.
