SEQUIM — Brad Griffith gets down and dirty with earthworms and loves it.
“You’re talking about the bottom of the barrel here,” he said with a wry grin, indicating that if you can’t have a sense of humor about his unusual pastime and come down to a worm’s level, well, that’s your problem.
No wonder he’s called “the worm guy” around Sequim by those who know of his creepy-crawly hobby and passion for finding how the worm turns.
As a result, he’s learned a lot about night crawlers, things that people never noticed.
Earthworms armor the entries to their worm holes with small rocks.
They collect and pile organic debris — the grass, leaves, stems and blades of grass that make up their food supply — on top of the mounds they produce, known a worm middens.
The gravel they pile up around their midden mounds helps hold what they collect.
They love the man-made habitat of gravel driveways where they adjoin lawns, Griffith points out along his own driveway south of West Deytona Street.
Worms move things around, and there is evidence that they pull objects, such as pieces of pottery, far from their origins over time.
The long, red and slimy critters pull stems and blades of dried grass down into their holes to decompose for future meals.
If you’ve see these little piles in your yard, chances are good you’ve found worm middens.
Welcome to the wonderful world of earthworms.
While out pursuing his photography hobby, Griffith, a 52-year-old remodeling contractor and entrepreneur who is also perfecting the art of stick bending, happened upon the tiny mounds on the ground that included gravel, sticks and other objects such as pieces of pottery.
At the time he had no idea what they were.
Griffith, a man with a natural curiosity and eye for detail, approached nursery owners and landscapers in an attempt to get the answer.
They hadn’t a clue, either.
Later, an acquaintance urged him to go to the Internet and Google it using the search words “Darwin” and “worms.”
He found information that led him to naturalist and the father of evolution Charles Darwin’s studies of earthworms. Darwin studied earthworms and their habitat near the end of his life.
“I had seen the earthworms moving out there, but I never saw them moving anything,” Griffith said.
Griffith read Darwin on Earthworms: The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms and found it to be “as boring as watching worms work.”
But it got him off and crawling, so to speak.
As his own studies of earthworms became a hobby over more than two years, Griffith learned that the deaf and blind reddish-brown creatures move objects around.
With a flashlight he held in his mouth and a video camera, Griffith spent hundreds of hours recording and studying the movement and nocturnal behavior of earthworms.
He actually filmed worms not only eating decomposed matter but also green live vegetation, uploading his video clips to YouTube at http://tinyurl.com/4yzxhk2.
The videos show a worm moving a rock, grasping it with the suction of its mouth and pulling it by contract the muscles of its elongated body.
They also show a worm eating, while another moves in reverse back to its hole.
“As far as I can tell, no one has got anything up on the Internet like that,” he said of the clip showing a worm eating green vegetation.
Griffith discovered a number of worm midden fields in graveled areas along Old Olympic Highway.
One on the edge of the Sequim city limits looks like the miniature village of Lumbricus Terrestris, the Latin name for the common earthworm.
Griffith has shared his videos with Nico Eisenhauer, an expert in the study of earthworms and a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota Department of Forest Resources.
Eisenhauer has researched and written about the consequences of earthworm invasions of northern North American forests.
“I like Brad’s videos very much because they show what I have suggested in a couple of scientific publications — the herbivorous behavior of some earthworm species,” Eisenhauer said.
While there is much documentation of earthworms moving objects on the soil surface, Eisenhauer said, “The most interesting part for me is the damaging of living plants, which is not so established so far . . .
“We are currently trying to perform some standardized experiments to quantify the earthworm impact on the plants in the vicinity of middens — but I have no idea if this will lead to publishable results.”
Griffith has the support of his wife, Kelly, who jokes that she knew about her husband’s unusual hobby of observing worms before they were wed.
“I married him anyway,” she said with a gentle smile.
When shooting videos of earthworms, he walks along the sidewalk next to his driveway to avoid scaring the worms back into their holes.
He has a worm patch outside his home where he conducts experiments.
He found that, if you place one end of a piece of string atop one worm hole and the other end on another hole, you will see a “worm tug of war” over time.
Worms also move tiny toy cars around overnight, he found.
But catching them in action is a real challenge and a test of extreme patience.
“Out of 100 sightings of worms, maybe 10 will remain there and maybe two will let me stop and see,” he said.
“It’s sort of like fishing. It is the number of times you cast that makes the difference.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Jeff Chew can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at jeff.chew@peninsuladailynews.com.
