GRUNTING FOR WIGGLERS
Posted by Richard Conniff on October 14, 2008
Flags mark spots where worms emerged for grunter Gary Revell.
In my book Spineless Wonders–Strange Tales of the Invertebrate World (Holt, 1996), I wrote about making a living as a worm grunter. You can read part of my account below. And then you can read what you’ve been waiting for all these years, a new scientific explanation of the secret logic of worm grunting.
It’s a moment charged with nature’s drama, akin to David Attenborough creeping up on the mountain gorillas of Rwanda. I am thrashing through the piney flatwoods of the Florida Panhandle, into the secret realm of the great shaper of the earth. Listen!
RUNT-runt, RUNT-runt, RUNT-runt. It’s a sound like a wild hog wallowing, somewhere out here in the Apalachicola National Forest. Over that way!
A few steps more and, through the burnt gallberry brush, I spy a man, grinning and sweating, slashed head-to-toe with soot. He is on his knees in front of a black stake, called a stob, hammered into the ground. He takes a shiny automobile leafspring and strokes the flat surface down rhythmically across the top of the stob: RUNT-runt, RUNT-runt, RUNT-runt. He pauses, listens, then varies the rhythm, catching the stob on a backstroke. The earth quakes around him. It looks like some primitive cargo cult ritual. In fact, the man is calling earthworms. Weirder still, he is making a living calling earthworms–or as they say hereabouts “grunting.”
As he works, Ruben Hill’s glance darts around the floor of the forest, which the rangers have burned lately to knock down the undergrowth (incidentally improving visibility for grunters). All around, worms are poking their angry pink heads up through the blackened soil. They shoulder themselves out of their burrows, shimmying, dancing, twitching along on their 10-inch bellies, driven to frenzy by this infernal vibration. Then Hill, a 36-year-old who learned worm grunting at his Daddy’s knee, grabs a paint can and strides around snatching up his haul, about 160 worms in five minutes. They will do their final dance on a fishhook, having been gussied up for sale by bait shops under names like “Louisiana pinks” (a cunning way to hide their true origin from interlopers), or simply “grunt worms.”
Hill eyeballs several wriggling paintcans-ful. “I’ve made it to 2500,” he says. The early morning sun is still glinting sideways through the forest. “That’s $75 right there. Not a bad payday.” He’ll double it by noon.
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Now it turns out, according to Vanderbilt biologist Ken Catania, that the earthworms come to the surface under the delusion that they are fleeing from moles. Fleeing from moles is normally a good idea for earthworms, since a single mole can eat its own weight in earthworms daily. ”The moles are quite noisy,” says Catania. ”Often you can hear the sounds of a mole digging in the wild from a few feet away.” It’s not quite the same noise that worm grunters make, apparently, but close enough for a nervous earthworm. Catania notes that humans aren’t the only species to exploit this behavior. A species of gull uses “foot paddling” behavior to lure earthworms to the surface, and wood turtles stomp.
You can read Catania’s study here. Or go here to check out photos like the really yummy one of a grunter’s day’s catch.
