The giant Palouse earthworm is the stuff of legends. Reportedly growing up to three feet in length, the worm is also notoriously difficult to track down—so difficult that scientists in the 1990s believed it was extinct. And it supposedly smells like lillies.
But the recent discovery of two specimens of Driloleirus americanus by pedologist Karl Umiker and graduate student Shan Xu has undermined the veracity of the worm’s fairy tale-like qualities. Rather than unearthing two yard-long monsters, the pair found a small juvenile and an adult that “when we stretched it out and relaxed it,” Jodi Johnson-Maynard, Umiker’s supervisor and an associate professor of soil science, told the New York Times, “got bigger…between nine and ten inches.”
And the smell? Nothing like lillies, they report.
The adult worm had to be sacrificed in the name of science (the only sure way to identify the species is through dissection), but its DNA should enable less invasive IDs. The researchers coaxed (if that’s the word) the worms out of the dirt with electric current, placing eight electrodes in a foot-wide circle before giving them the juice. Umiker and Xu were likely surprised when the translucent worms emerged topside—giant Palouse earthworms can burrow 15 feet below the surface.
Photo courtesy of the University of Idaho.
