Thaindian News

April 28, 2010 (Pen Men at Work): Two breathing samples of the legendary giant, Palouse earthworm, have been seized for the first time in two decades. This embodies a momentous finding of a creature that has acquired a mythic standing in the agricultural Palouse region on the Washington-Idaho border.

The gigantic Palouse earthworm has captivated scientists for decades after long being disregarded as a vanished creature. News in the past indicated that the worms had a fondness for spitting and smelt like lilies. This further increased the legend of the earthworm in the area.

University of Idaho’s soil scientist, Jodi Johnson-Maynard, has been skippering the investigation and has stated that it is an excellent day for the worm.

The latest unearthing of the worms seems to have chased away the myth about the creature’s exterior. They don’t cough up, or smell like lilies, and aren’t even that colossal.

Johnson-Maynard verbalized that, when the discovery was proclaimed on Tuesday, one of her collaborators recommended that they rename it the ‘larger-than average Palouse earthworm.’

While it was believed that the worm grew up to 3 feet long, the adult worm measured approximately 10 or 12 inches when wholly extended, while the juvenile was 6 or 7 inches.

The worms were see-through, which permitted internal organs to come into sight. They possessed pink heads and globular tails. The adult had a yellowish band behind the head.

The specimens were unearthed on March 27 by Shan Xu, an Idaho student, and Karl Umiker, a research support scientist. They have also discerned three earthworm cocoons, two of which have emerged and which also appear to be the colossal Palouse earthworms.

The Palouse earthworm was initially mentioned to the scientific globe in an 1897 commentary in The American Naturalist by Frank Smith. Smith’s work was anchored in four samples supplied to him by R.W. Doane of the Washington State University in Pullman.

Substantial agricultural expansion soon devoured nearly all of the matchless Palouse Prairie. This was an apparently never-ending ocean of steep dunes. This seemed to have dealt an incurable blow to the worm.

In the late 1980s, however, the University of Idaho scientist, James Johnson, discerned two worms in a second-growth forest near Moscow in Idaho. They were the last breathing specimens detected until now.