Thousands of worms found in neat piles on road

First it was the rats, now the worms…

I’m not too worried unless the dogs start growing together into hive dog beings.

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That’s where I left those!

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Obviously it’s Mind Worms

That or someone tossed out the contents of a bunch of styrofoam fish bait containers.

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I’ve seen a worm ball like this before, in my basement.

I put too much spoiled fruit in the worm box, and it fermented and made alcohol. Smelled like a winery in there… worms don’t like alcohol. So they made a mass exodus, climbing the side of the bin and forcing the lid off and crawling away to a new home… somewhat unsuccessfully, although they certainly did catch my attention, so I fixed the problem for them before putting them back.

We joked that the ball was the entire worm tribe protecting the worm king in the center. There were individual worm scouts radiating out in every direction from the box, in an almost perfect pattern, and the one giant ball.

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Any chance it was some bait seller just dumping out their stock on the way home?

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Note to self: “clump of worms” is a good phrase. I need to use it for something.

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Look at that. My old hometown is in the news and no one got shot.

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I think they climbed out to not drown and then had an orgy. Seriously.

… to describe a clump of worms?

In sophisticated banter?

She had so much to drink, she was like a… clump of worms. [puffs on looooong cigarette holder]

This looks like a classic case of …

(••)
( •
•)>⌐■-■
(⌐■_■)

Global worming…

YEEEEAAAHHHH!!!

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That was one of our theories… since worms are hermaphroditic and generally mate by random encounter, the ball could be an emergent side-effect of all the worms randomly encountering each other at once.

However, the ball does travel. Not quickly, but it moves as a unit, kind of like a single organism. (OK, well, at least the one in my basement did. Not really science when you’ve only one observation to work from.)

The fact that the piles of worms seem to have that weird dirt/paper fiber media in a nice little disc on top makes me suspect you’re entirely right. Someone just upended those little styrofoam tubs onto the road. Kind of a dick move for releasing worms…

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PETA, probably.

There’s always something new to discover in Biology…

I hope the “rain sounds like predators” hypothesis wasn’t put forth seriously, or soberly.

I think the “rain sounds like it will drown you out of your underground tunnels/substrate” theory is a bit more likely…

Doesn’t explain what was so special about this one rainstorm that it caused them to clump together instead of going about their own business like every other time it rains. Dumped-out-by-a-human is by far the most plausible.

I should have been more clear. The whole “rain sounds like X” theories come up all the time to explain why worms leave supposed safety in the ground to drown in puddles or get eaten by birds on the surface. I in no way meant to defend what I see as a ludicrous explanation for some folks having dumped bait worms out of their tubs (with their substrate intact) in little piles with little substrate hats.

I think the whole “rain sounds like…” thoughts are a bit daft. Rain will drown you if you’re in a tunnel or porous substrate. Even if you run the chance of getting eaten on the surface or falling into a gutter or puddle and drowning, your chances are still better than the 100% chance you’d have of drowning if you’d stayed in the waterlogging ground.

Also, worms can’t move anywhere near quickly enough to evade predators, so running away is obviously not any part of their survival strategy.