Once frozen you can check the clitellum a little easier. Actually, if you see a real wiggler, put it into a plastic bag and toss it into a freezer. If you see a worm that wildly wiggles and giggles when you touch it, check to see if it has a complete clitellum. And, if you must buy worms from any source, check them, indoors, before you use them in your yard. My advice is not to buy worms from Outside sources. We don’t have a worm police force so all we can do here is watch and check. If you do, dig them out of your own yard instead of buying them from some source that could care less about Alaska. Most of us don’t use worms here in Alaska’s streams and lakes. In Michigan, fisherman buy them as bait and then toss any left. We will be the ones that transport them here. They don’t move fast enough for them to travel by themselves from the Midwest to, say, Anchorage. So what do we do? Well, first of all, we should remember how worms get here. With our short season, things would have a difficult time growing back. They could devour the debris in our forests’ understory. These are not the kind of earthworms we want in Alaska. I am not sure if these worms would make it here given the length of our winters, but they survive in Northern Michigan, so why wouldn’t they do fine here? In any case, we don’t want to find out. Consider insects that depend on the missing plants and the same for mammals, like moose. The not-so-obvious impacts are on the biome. All of this activity has disastrous consequences: No new soil is made once the organic matter is used up and there is a loss of plants. These worms can also eat roots of some plants if there is nothing else for them to consume.
However, in order to eat them the material has to go through the worm.
Actually, they are after microbes on the material, not the organic matter itself. The problem with these new invasive worms is that they eat all the organic matter in soils and do so too quickly. They are actually a good thing as they contain a lot of nutrients. People don’t know about their castings, which form “bumps” in lawns. I often get questions from readers who are not familiar with earthworms. Some came up in bags of soil, some were purchased for vermicomposting, some hitchhiked in houseplant pots and more. Actually, all earthworms in Alaska are invasive.
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