Emphasis was placed on physical and chemical aspects of plant growth while biological aspects were neglected. And it’s based on this rate that Van Praagh estimates the worm can live as long as 10 years–and probably a lot more.Only a few decades ago, the predominating thought was that earthworms were not very important for agriculture. Its growth rate for the rest of its life, though, is slow.
When it does, at a foot long the baby is already huge (for perspective, that's as big as a foot-long Subway sandwich. The egg is then laid in a chamber branching off from the burrow, and can take as many as 12 months to hatch. When the worms finally decide they're financially stable and mature enough to have a child, a structure called a clitellum releases an egg case, which slides forward and gathers eggs and sperm. This could be advantageous for worms in low densities and poor dispersal abilities.”įertilization actually occurs inside the egg cocoon, which a worm will produce only once a year. Van Praagh has found that the worms will store sperm year-round, which means “that they may potentially mate whenever they meet and then store the sperm, ready for producing eggs whenever conditions are favorable. Individuals have both male and female sex organs, and Van Praagh reckons that they align their naughty bits and hand off sperm (here, trade ya!), which is stored in chambers called spermathecae. Mistaking it for a snake, with great care they took it to a professor at the University of Melbourne, who I hope informed them that snakes generally have, you know, teeth and scales and stuff. These elusive monsters have been known to science only since the late 1800s, when workers unearthed a specimen while surveying a rail line. Give it a stretch–only if it’s already dead, you chucklehead–and it can easily double in length. But perhaps its most remarkable creature is a gentle, extremely delicate colossus few have had the privilege of glimpsing: the giant Gippsland earthworm, which can grow to some 6 feet long. The continent’s long isolation has given rise to an incredibly unique diversity of life that, yes, includes some extremely lethal critters. But the truth is there are plenty of harmless animals and even a handful of harmless humans in Australia. They say everything in Australia can kill you: crazy-poisonous eastern brown snakes, enormous saltwater crocodiles, and, until recently, the late ill-tempered supercriminal Mark “Chopper” Read.
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