My spouse is a high school teacher, and because her students are no longer attending class, they have more time to make TikTok videos.
I’m not quite sure what a TikTok video is. I think it’s something like a Vine video, but longer. Or perhaps something like a YouTube video, but shorter. Or perhaps something like a Music Video, but not introduced by Kurt Loder.
Last year I was volunteering with a local sixth grader once a week, working mostly on music theory and game design, and every so often he’d eye me as though I were a Homo erectus freshly emerged from a block of glacial ice. My gaffes weren’t even that egregious! I just don’t know about TikTok!
So it goes.
While working on a TikTok video, one of my spouse’s students messaged her to ask, “Would you still teach me if I was a worm?”
My spouse wrote back, “I don’t know. One of my kids had ringworm last year and it was awful!”
Ask a silly question, you get a silly answer.
And that’s where it should end, right? But the student persisted – after all, my spouse’s answer was insufficient basis for a good TikTok video.
“No, I mean like a regular earthworm.”
So, here’s the deal. If you ask a silly question – once – you get a silly answer. But the second time?
If I were working with a student interested in the educational capabilities of earthworms, I’d first mention Charles Darwin’s experiments on earthworm intelligence. Worms dig little burrows in the dirt, and they often plug the entrances of these with leaves.
So Darwin gave the worms novel building materials – not space-age polymer fabrics or anything, just different types of leaves – and let the worms choose which to use to plug up their burrows. In his estimation, the worms made sensible choices. You can read a lovely description of this experiment in Eileen Crist’s “The Inner Life of Earthworms.”
Then I might slide into a discussion of equality among worms, perhaps citing the recent children’s picture book, Worm Loves Worm. I imagine that, like the other characters of that story, our worm’s schoolmates would benefit by having more diversity in class.
And then, because my thoughts tend to careen suddenly to darkness, I might mention my unfinished horror novel, “Our Heroic Annelid Makes a Daring Escape.”
You see, moles often capture worms and save them for later. The doomed worms are stored inside the mole’s burrow.
The mole doesn’t kill the worms – then they’d rot. But worms can’t just be left inside a mud-lined burrow – then they’d dig their way out.
So moles mutilate their captives. An injured worm is unable to dig free, and, because worms rely largely on their sematosensory system to construct a mental image of the world, the worm is partially blinded.
But worms can regenerate. So the tension of the story becomes, will the worm heal before the mole returns to eat it?
All told, I would be willing to teach an earthworm. It seems that worms have the cognitive capacity to learn at least a little. But it would be heartbreaking to have one of my students captured by a mole.
Image from Soil-Net.com at Cranfield University, UK, 2015.
We were in Louisville over the weekend, visiting a pregnant friend. She had given us many baby clothes before the birth of our daughter; we were returning them. Her son is now nearly three years old, so we spent part of the afternoon standing in the yard watching him dig with a plastic shovel. He found a worm, triumphantly showed it to us, then moved it to a safe spot near their sprouting peas.
That’s when my friend and I started talking about worms.
“Moles are their worst enemies,” she told me. “They hunt worms and store them in their burrows. But moles have to keep the worms fresh. If they kill them, worms dry up. So moles bite off their heads, which means they can’t dig out to escape.”
I grimaced slightly while slurping my pink strawberry smoothie through a straw.
“That doesn’t kill them. And, actually, if you wait long enough, the worms can regenerate their heads.”
“Huh,” I said, nodding. “So it’s a race?”
“Guess where this dirt goes, mommy.”
“In the pile?”
“Yes! In the pile!” And another plastic shovel’s worth of dirt was added to the small mound he’d made beside their flower bed.
I went on, imagining this could be the seed of a compelling suspense or horror story. “Because once the mole leaves, the worm would be racing, frantically trying to regrow its head so that it could escape. Seems way more intense than all those movies where a tied-up hostage is struggling with the ropes.”
“And this dirt?”
“In the pile?”
“It goes in the pile!”
“Except, wait… worms can think, right?” I asked her. I wasn’t sure, being unaware, for instance, of Charles Darwin’s 1881 study to test whether worms could solve small puzzles, like choosing which objects could best be used to plug a burrow. And the question felt important; it’d be hard to write a compelling story when working with the drab emotional palette and unreflective inner life of a jellyfish. Jellyfish, see, have no brains.
“They do, I think,” she told me. “But I don’t think they’re very cephalated.”
“Oh,” I said, thinking the idea of an in-between state, brain-bearing yet decentrilized-decision-making, sounded perfectly reasonable. After all, that organizational scheme has led to considerable success for terrorist organizations like al Qaeda, if “success” means propagation despite environmental adversity, so why not believe that evolution could’ve stumbled into the same schema employed biologically? “But then, what would the worm feel?”
“Worm! Where is my worm?”
“You set it over there, honey?”
He scampered over to the peas and peered. No worm, apparently, was found.
“Worm went away!”
“That’s what they do. They dig. Now the worm is underground.”
“Underground,” he mused. And set a dirt-flecked hand upon his chin, philosophically.
At the time I worried that an uncephalated worm (i.e. cognitive function was never fully localized to the head, as opposed to our decephalated hero post encounter with the nemesis mole) would make a lousy protagonist. Being a brain-in-head-type fellow, I am somewhat biased toward the emotional experiences of my own kind. Now, though, I’m not so sure. Because head-centered cognition might well result in a worse, emotionally flattened story; the most dramatic action occurs while our protagonist’s head is missing, after all.
And I’m still concerned about my original question, what would a worm feel? If I’m going through all the bother of writing a story, I’d like for people to enjoy it. And I’ve seen many reviews that criticize human male writers, say, for attempting to inhabit the inner voice of a woman in fiction, or an iphone. Although those perspectives both seem easier to project myself into than that of a worm. The life of an iPhone seems so similar to my own. Talk to people; look up facts; draw maps; listen to snippets of music and try to guess the song; spend aggravatingly long periods of time thinking, thinking, thinking, with no apparent progress visible from the outside. Or perhaps that last one is not what you think of when you contemplate such devices, but my younger brother has one and he also has a tendency toward dropping things, and of forgetting things in his pants’ pockets when he puts them in the wash (you may have read previously his très bourgeois tragicomedy, “Another Bagful of Rice”). His phone spends as much time as I do staring idly into space, unresponsive.
Her slight error does not invalidate the story, however; according to A. C. Evans’ article “The Identity of Earthworms Stored by Moles,” it would seem that our heroic earthworm might not require a whole new head. To quote Evans regarding the potential status of our hero, “The earthworms could not burrow their way out of the holes because the anterior three to five segments had been bitten off or at least mutilated.”
The worms whose heads were bitten off? They are doomed. They will not regenerate their heads and will eventually be eaten (unless some larger predator finds the mole, in which case they’ll die fruitlessly… although even then they’ll still be eaten, I suppose, as long as you’re willing to use the verb “eat” to describe decomposition effected by bacteria). But if our hero was simply mutilated, then there is still a chance! Come on, little buddy! You can do it! Escape, escape!
And, in case you’re curious about earthworm cognition, Eileen Crist wrote a lovely article describing Charles Darwin’s experiments; it was published in Bekoff, Allen, and Burghardt’s The Cognitive Animal and is very accessible (I even convinced K to have her high school biology class read it one year) and, to my mind, very fun. Well worth a read, even if you don’t yet care about worm thoughts. But you will! Just you wait.
Frank Brown Cloud 