Chapter 1: What misconceptions do we have about worms?
Not exactly cute or charismatic, their reputation has been dragged through the mud throughout history. They've been associated with death, decay, disease, take your pick. Meanwhile, these small creatures have paid absolutely no attention to our human vanity and, frankly, our ignorance. Their enormous, adaptable, diverse family has been quietly thriving in almost every corner of Earth.
burrowing through soil for over 500 million years, earning job titles as natural ploughs and ecosystem engineers, breathing life into death. And despite everything, they've always been there for us. Whether you think of the food we grow, the clean water we drink, or the little birds singing outside your window, happy and full, you've got worms. in a good way.
Welcome to Life Without, where I pull a single thread from our magnificent world, something we take for granted, just gone with my powers. No warning, no clever workarounds, just the unravelling. How far will it run? Can we stitch a patch and survive the wear and tear? BBC Radio 4, this is Life Without, with me, Alan Davis.
And together, we'll find out if a life without worms ends up unpicking reality as we know it.
I'm a great admirer of worms.
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Chapter 2: How do earthworms contribute to our ecosystem?
They're like my best friends. I love worms more than I love people, I have to say, worms and plants. People, not so much.
LAUGHTER
What I know about worms I mostly learned at school, and that, you might be surprised to hear, was a long time ago. So here to help me construct this world, Sandra Salazar-Decker, a soil sister, horticulturalist, and the founder of Go Grow With Love, a women-led enterprise teaching communities to reconnect with the land through food growing.
And Mark Hodson, professor of environmental science at the University of York with a particular interest in earthworm ecology.
a world without earthworms would be a serious grim place indeed.
Before we had anything like modern biology, worm was a catch-all for pretty much anything small, long and wriggly. These days, we know that worms living in our guts, for example, have very little in common with the earthworms turning over the soil in your garden. And today, my choice falls on earthworms. It's September in my little experimental universe. Peak season for hungry earthworms.
The soil's still warm, nicely damp from late summer rain, and they're hard at work. But not for long.
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Chapter 3: What happens in a world without earthworms?
On my count, three, two, one, the next shuffle of soil comes up empty. We're about to spend ten years without worms. It's one hour in. It's a beautiful morning, the sun is shining, the birds are chatting away, but someone has to get the bad news first.
Mark, who's that going to be? I suspect it's going to be the topic of conversation if you're chatting birds, and the conversation will be something like, where's all the food gone? Earthworms are like a good quality sausage, full of protein, and birds eat them a lot.
The British Trust for Ornithology did a study, and they looked at the abundance of birds, like thrushes, blackbirds, robins, and the more earthworms you have, the more of those birds you have as well. And so would a bunch of mammals be worrying about where their favourite snack was. Moles love eating earthworms. A mole can eat over half its body weight in earthworms in a day.
That's a lot of worms. Yeah. Sandra, I'm assuming that you're up at the same time as the birds. Yes. How do you take the news in the first hour, a world without worms?
My heart just felt like it stopped for a second because... How are we going to survive? How are we going to grow our foods? Worms are so important to the breakdown process of the food and the foliage and all the dead animals. There's this symbiotic relationship that we have with worms. And I don't think we realise that worms are like the heartbeat of the land, of the soil.
They play such an important role in creating those technologies. tunnels under the surface where the oxygen and the water can come to. And it really, for me, reflects the way that we are as human beings. So when I look at the worm, I reflect to how our own body is made up. We are soil. Those tunnels are the veins and the tunnels where our blood circulates through.
And the worms are our soldiers that helps all of that come together.
Yes.
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Chapter 4: How does the absence of worms affect soil health?
quite bad news for you then sandra mark i'm worried about sandra can you think of an upside well i am known for my optimism good good so i guess the fish would be quite happy right there's less angling going on less angling the maggot farmers as our fishermen look for a different bit of bait might be rubbing their hands and seeing a market opportunity we've had one hour of a life without worms and unless you're a maggot farmer monetizing maggots news is bad
Now it's one year in. And I think it's a good time for us to grab our magnifying glasses and get down to life under the soil. Mark, paint us a picture. What's it looking like down there?
What's going on down there is a big shift in the sort of organisms you'd find. That's the bacteria and the fungi. Earthworms generally result in more bacteria than fungi. So now the earthworms have gone. Bacterial numbers are down and fungal numbers are up.
And probably the bacteria which were still there were less helpful for plant growth and more likely to be plant pests because what we see in the presence of earthworms is an increase in beneficial bacteria. have an enormous impact on the generation of soil, don't they? Earthworms can produce quite a lot of soil by breaking down organic matter and mixing it with minerals.
They move an incredible amount of soil. It's something between about 10 and 100 tonnes of soil per year, per acre of land. And without those earthworms, there's less soil. And the soil that's there is markedly different as well. The earthworm burrows create holes and pores in the soil.
And when the earthworms ingest and then ingest soil, so the soil that comes out the back end of an earthworm produces these sort of small, bobbly things called aggregates.
I can't tell you, Lister, the look of joy on Sandra's face, the first mention of an earthworm cast. It's literally your favourite thing on earth.
It is. You'll see me around with Valeo Bucket going around in parks.
You're collecting those? Yeah. Because they're nutrient-rich, right, the cast? Yes, black gold. Black gold, yeah. So, Sandra, imagine the plants have exhausted all the last of the earthworm castes. The decomposition that earthworms are responsible for is slowing right down.
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Chapter 5: What changes occur in soil composition without worms?
Can we give nature a boost?
Me personally, I don't do chemical fertilizers. I'm 100% against that. I wouldn't drink poison, so I don't want to poison my land. Instead, I work with what I have. I began by chopping off all my foliage, looking into my compost.
I'm not really one who picks up the phone and talks to people very often, but I've had a really fun day calling up my family and friends and tell them to please keep their kitchen waste for me to pick them up, inviting them over to my land as well. So now every Friday we're going to meet on the land and we're going to feed the land and get some life back into the soil.
You paint a lovely picture and I'm glad because earlier on you were saying that you'd rather talk to a worm than a person and I was concerned. But now you're having a Friday compost meeting and perhaps this will be happening all over the country now a year without worms. But will it be enough? Can you replace the work of the worms?
Not just in one family or one street, but it would have to be a collective effort. It won't just be enough, but it's the beginning.
There's going to have to be a huge change and a new attitude towards food waste especially and the waste of organic matter. This worm-shaped hole is... So there's quite a significant reduction in just the amount of crops we can grow.
Yeah. So as the earthworms are processing the soil, they do a lot of things. Typically, plants grow about 25% better in the presence of earthworms. And there was a recent modeling study that shows that earthworms are responsible for about 6.5% of global grain production and a bit more than 2% of global legume production as well.
So now there'll either be less food available or we'll probably be using more inorganic fertilizers to compensate for the absence of earthworms. And that's bad news because there's a big carbon footprint involved in the production of inorganic fertilizers.
If we were going to replace the earthworm activity and the boost to plant growth through composting, we'd need to be better at chopping it up into small pieces because that's one thing that earthworms are really good at. They speed up the composting process. Mm-hmm.
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Chapter 6: How do earthworms impact plant growth and food production?
It's more a case of what isn't underground now. So their burrows, probably gone. And the soil structure, these aggregates, those will have broken down as well. So the soil will be more compact. Soil's a bit like a sponge. And earthworms help the soil stay spongy. So in the absence of the earthworms, water, A, can't flow through it. So it's going to start increasing flood risks.
And B, the soil can't hold water either. So it's going to be another nail in the coffin of plant growth. What's more, because the water can't get through the soil, it's not going to be filtered. So as water percolates through soil, it's often filtered and some chemicals get removed. It helps clean the water up. And there's a sort of multiple whammy.
Soil erosion is probably going to get worse as well. So soil grows at about the speed that your fingernails grow. it can erode up to 10 times more quickly than that. And earthworms help reduce soil erosion because earthworms mean you've got more roots, that holds the soil together. So we're losing soil as well. We need soil to grow plants, to feed ourselves.
I grew up in Epping Forest when I was a kid. I spent a lot of time in Epping Forest and it's my happy place. So will that be different? How do forests survive with no worms?
In a sense, we've done this experiment in reverse. After the last glaciation ice age in America about 10 or 20,000 years ago, all the soil was scraped off. So North America doesn't have a significant native earthworm population. But there are lots of European earthworms, and they came over with the colonizers or invaders. The earthworms can consume like 10 centimeters depth of leaves in a year.
So that thickness of leaves is essentially gone.
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Chapter 7: What lessons can we learn from a decade without worms?
That changes the plants which can germinate. You get fewer plants germinating and growing and fewer plants for the deer to eat. So that's a bigger and bigger proportion of the plants being eaten. And that increases the amount of light which reaches the forest floor. So the entire ecosystem's changed.
And because nature isn't a linear system, it's hard to be precise about how our forests have changed, but it certainly would have changed a lot. It would probably have a far thicker depth of leaves, probably good news for kids and grown-ups who want to run around scuffing up leaves. There's always a joy in the autumn. But the types of plants which can grow will have changed.
The whole picture's changed, but the main thing is we're all meeting at Sandra's on a Friday. And that's been going on for 10 years now. The Decade Without Worms, has it given you any enthusiasm as you return to your life in the real world?
I don't think I needed more enthusiasm for earthworms anyway. It makes you really appreciate how important they are. They do so many things for us as a society and for the planet. They ask for very little in return. And we should celebrate them and celebrate all that they do for us.
I completely underestimated that tiny creature. It takes an army of fertilizers, compost, and people aerating the soil to even attempt a few of its jobs, and we still can't match it. So here's hoping the next generations, unlike me, don't forget how vital worms are.
And on that note, I'd just like to say, quoting the brilliant Julia Donaldson, superworm is super long, superworm is super strong, watch him wiggle, see him squirm, hip hip hooray for superworm. A massive thank you for my guests, Mark Hodson and Sandra Salazar-Decker. Next time on Life Without, we lose the colour in our food when the crystals that shaped civilisations suddenly dissolve.
Join me for a life without salt. Life Without Worms was produced by Rehan Musa with support from Michelle Martin. Rubina Babani is the executive producer, Emily Jarvis is production manager, and sound design and mix is by Nick Hanley and Tom Butler. The commissioning editor for Radio 4 is Rhian Roberts. This is an ITN production for BBC Radio 4.
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Nature.
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Chapter 8: How can we restore soil health without worms?
For so many of us, it's life-changing, a source of inspiration and joy. I'm Martha Carney. I've been meeting actors, writers, scientists, chefs to explore how their love of nature has shaped their lives.
What's great is it keeps you in tune with the seasons.
From Martin Clunes to Delia Smith, Hamza Yassin to Cate Blanchett. Isn't that gorgeous?
I love the sense of mystery.
We'll discover the surprising ways the natural world has inspired them and find out what we can all learn from nature.
When I'm feeling down, I've had enough. All I need to do is pick up my binoculars and walk outside.
This Natural Life. Listen now on BBC Sounds.
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