When clearing my flower beds of all the Fall leaves, I always find lots of skinny red worms. I take it worms don't need dirt to live? and here there is grey clay and in TX there is red clay. What's the dif?
No shit its a subsoil feature it's what I've been talking about the whole time, but nice job covering you're ass never-the-less.
There are 12 Soil Orders. A really good breakdown is here with US distribution maps: http://soils.usda.gov/technical/classification/orders/ Somewhere within that site is a global soil distribution map that is high resolution and very large. Heres a page with a bunch of links regarding soils: http://soils.usda.gov/education/
sub soil clay? impossible... I lived on the outskirts of moscow, we had about seven different kinds of clay in little pits, we used to make ceramic stoves out of them for saunas and such, digging all the way through about 3m I never saw a single worm in an area usually full of them.
The earthworm is a tunneler that eats its way through the soil, converting clay into rich, living earth. http://ladywildlife.com/animal/commonearthworm.html The Conditions that Earthworm thrive in are, loose airy Soils, but not Sandy. They will dig through Clay Soils, and thats why they are prized by Gardeners, taking Organic matter with them, and leaving their Casings behind. http://en.allexperts.com/q/Composting-712/Earthworms.htm For example, a batch of smectite digested by earthworms yielded 1,645 micrograms of total water dissolved metals per gram of the clay mass, whereas the same clay but without any earthworm activities had 327 micrograms of total water dissolved metals per gram of the clay. http://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2002AM/finalprogram/abstract_37012.htm These experiments have also shown increases in potassium contents of the clays by earthworm digestion. http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cach...rm&hl=nl&ct=clnk&cd=17&gl=nl&client=firefox-a The presence of earthworms in relation to clay soil structure problems in arable fields in the Flevopolders (the Netherlands) was studied. Recently, farmers in this area have had difficulty in harvesting potatoes in predominantly wet years. After a dry period, soil particles in the top layer of the potato ridges form a platy structure and are difficult to sieve. Locally, this resulted in many clods, and sometimes harvesting proved impossible. In the field, significantly more earthworms (mainly Aporrectodea caliginosa and A. rosea) were observed in the problem parts than in the non-problem parts. A macrocosm study showed significantly more settlement and soil stickiness and an increasing number of large clods caused by greater numbers of A. caliginosa. The results of this study reveal earthworms to be the main factor affecting the state of the soil and causing the harvesting problems. http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=13694734 Worms are in clay.
Cool it, Jack!! You never ONCE mentioned subsoil - and that's not the only place clay is found.:bugeye:
Right! You are talking about ONE personal experience and trying to generalize that to cover the whole world. That's hardly a good approach to providing information - in fact, it's terrible.:bugeye:
I really don't care to be honest, worms can do what they want. Enmos poted a good link, now I know where to look for bait, but I will continue to say that even the hardcore russian worm, dos'nt burrow into sub soil clay, or maybe our's is just toxic.
Most worms eat decomposing organic matter - they can "live" in shredded newspaper, if they are fed. AFAIKThe only worms in the higher latitudes that would have any reason to burrow into inorganic clay would be the big ones called "nightcrawlers" in my area. They don't eat dirt to process it for its organics (they eat leaves and stuff on the surface) and just tunnel down (sometimes a meter or more) for protection and housing, so they might dig a house into a clay layer. They can't take saturation, though. Few worms can, AFAIK. (All the worms in the northern US are imports, mostly from Europe in the 1700s and 1800s, btw. ) That link to the soils maps is a fine link, thanks! (If anyone cares, check out the world wide distribution of the kind of mollisoil found in Iowa, and compare it with a rainfall map - one reason the US is the agricultural powerhouse of the world will become more clear.)
