 Hi, everybody, thank you for coming. Let's see, this is our second presentation on the Invasive Precision Snake worms a couple of years ago. We had a, Joseph came and talked at the Unitarian Church. And I don't know, maybe I'll just give you a little background. Maybe everyone didn't attend that talk. But a few years ago, several of us were noticing that there were these crazy worms that we had in our gardens. There were earthworms that were really big and very active. And we thought, wow, this is just nice. You've got some nice worms. And then it turns out that these worms are very, very voracious. And we actually noticed that they were actually starting to damage our plants. And so somehow or other, we found out they were called crazy snake worms and googled them and found out that there was somebody right here in Vermont, at the University of Vermont, doing research on them. And so that's how we got connected with Joseph Glories. And so we invited him to come and talk to us a couple of years ago. And since then, he's been doing continued research. And so we thought it'd be good to get a update on that and also to bring other people into the conversation that missed that talk and also to just keep putting it out in our newsletter and try to spread the word because we think it's significant enough that if we can do anything about implementing the spread, it would be a wonderful thing. So we're really lucky today to have Orca Media, the Montpelier Public Access Channel, this video in this. And the video will be available sometime like it. We'll let you know how to connect with that. We'll put a link on our website, certainly, which is if you Google PartyPlanets, love it or not, you can find our site. Also, we'll put a notice in our newsletters. And if anybody's not a member, there's membership forms here if you want to join. And also, the article, let's see, we've done some articles on Joseph in our newsletters. And there's at least one of those posted on our site. So if you want to check that out, it's also there. So I guess I'll just turn it over to Joseph now and let him tell you what he's been doing since we last read from him. Thank you, Joseph. Thank you. Thanks for the introduction. So if you haven't seen these ones yet, all these wonderful lives, you probably know now where they're from, snake worms. And the craziness is, I'm not showing that craziness. There's actually a little bit of a thinking of craziness. We've touched on it, we're like a pressure bout. And the other crazy thing is that it was the tail when you abused them. And the tail just waxed about like crazy. And the worm wiggles away. So they're definitely crazy. And they are in other places they're called jumping worms, Jersey regalers, all sorts of names. What else? There's a whole bunch of names for them, common names. So I will just give you a quick rundown on the history of things in a second. So before I do that, I'd like to thank a couple of people and a couple of organizations. So the Highway Fund has funded part of my research. And then the Epi Foundation for Research has also funded part of this research. And you'll notice that both of those funders are private funders. They're not the government. They're not the states. And we'll talk about that later while that might be. I have a couple of grad students that work in this scenario. It's my present grad student. And she is working really hard at understanding the genetics of these worms and where they might have come from and how many invasions might have occurred, how many introductions have occurred over the years. And Erin Keller was a grad student with one of my cohorts at the university. And she specifically looked at parasites of these worms. And then we have a couple of undergraduate technicians that have worked with us in there. They did a fantastic job learning science, but also helping science in this project. OK, so five parts to this talk is a quick introduction of what these things are. We went here two years ago and gave this first talk over in the church. Then I'll talk about the history and the current extent of the invasion. And again, a little bit into Mario's research, the sources of genetic variation that we see in Vermont and the control of snake worms towards the end. So it's day and totally end, right? You put your hand away if you don't have everything about how to control the right way. And that might even get involved. What are some of the things that you can do that you will be able to do in the near future? It's really important that citizens and people get involved with some of this research. So first of all, why do we worry about this? And that's a really good question, because all of us grew up. So I grew up over in Europe. And of course, I found so great about how worms have been around there for much longer than here. So in Europe, we talked about last glaciation was about the same time as here. The glaciation was what killed the worms here. They did the same thing in Europe. But people traveled around a lot more in Europe even five, 6,000 years ago, not just 3,000 years ago. So these those worms, sometimes they're referred to as ferritima worms. And their name comes from a different genus of these worms called ferritima. So that doesn't exist anymore as a genus. It's really a messy taxonomy. Who is this worm? What does it look like? A lot of them look really similar. And there seem to be a lot of crossing over. It's just really weird. So because of that, that ferritima genus has been split into like 15 different genera now. And so what you're going to do with this, you have to have a name for all of them somehow. I think all of his genus is genera out there, which is quite a ferritima. And so all the snake worms are ferritima, but not all ferritima are just snake worms. So there's actually 172 species in the US. And quite a few of those are actually native. But they don't exist up here in the north. I think there's two species of native, but they don't see it. But how they got here is another question, whether they've been always been here or whether it just happened after the negotiation. There's one tenth of these, so actually 16 species of ferritimoids are known in North America. It includes Mexico, Canada, and all the ferritimoids are from one family or from the other. So that's the boring part of this talk. What's out there? History of the communications is really quick. So this black line there is the extent of the last glaciation. And so in the north of that, there's no native earthworms. South of that, there is native earthworms. And so the theory is that the earthworms that were brought over by the European settlers are first invaded in the area above the glaciation line. But you also find them now in areas where there's native earthworms. So there's also an invasion, a harmful invasion going on of European earthworms. And then there's a second wave of earthworms, that's the Megasocidae, and snakeworms. And they came from Asia. So different directions. And ever since they arrived, they had been moving around with the horticulture, with bait, and also very composting facilities. So they have been used for bait? Yes. They're not necessarily the best bait, but I've been told by people that fish that they have used them for bait. So because they're fresh about a lot, people think, oh, they're great for bait because they make their presence known in the water. But when you hook them apparently, they kind of explode because they have a lot of pressure in them that makes them feel so different. So different from European earthworms. I think European earthworms are like facet and lip and kind of drapes of the old. These guys, they're stiff. They're really muscular feeling. It's not that they have more muscles than European earthworms. They're more taller. But when they explode, I'm getting really worried. She would like me to hold that question. OK. OK. So there's this angler that fish with them. And that one is the best. It's actually a place that's invaded. Georgia is a mountain top that's invaded by them. It's really far from everywhere. And the reason why they're there is because there's a fishing spot and there's a small chalet there where people go to fish. And the owner actually put those worms there because he thought they were the greatest worms of fishing. And so now that's spread in the middle of nowhere, at high elevation. So the first step happens when you hunt these worms is that they're altered in the forest soil. And so they produce this layer of castings. And it can be 5-10 centimeters deep, which changes the way plants interact with that soil. So they're turning that nice spongy layer in a typical half wood forest into this layer of castings that's no longer spongy. It doesn't hold water well. Some plants you can just pull up because the roots are not really well anchored in them. And European earthworms also change the soil quite a bit. But they produce a denser soil. They also get rid of that half spongy layer. And they turn it into a much denser layer as well, which also has an effect on forest plants. So don't just think all those Asian earthworms are bad. European earthworms are also messy. OK, so forest ecology, this is the actual. Also, there's no earthworms here. So picture near Kelmsham. So you see what that last understory looks like. And then where you have these snakeworms, you have hardly any understory. You can almost tell when they arrive by looking at the age of the trees and the saplings that are there. Do they actually harm those roots of the trees, though? Do they do what? Sorry. That's a good question. We don't know. They probably harm any kind of mycorrhizal or fungal infections, which are important for many plants to create nutrients. So it's a possibility. And then there's a big question here. And you've got Montezio, do they harm sugar bush? And so people have found that wherever they go into sugar bush, they look at the regeneration rate of sugar maple that there tends to be a lot fewer saplings in the sugar bush than when the earthworms are not. So this is some of the data that we've collected in Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and I think State of New York. So number of saplings on the x-axis is snakeworms. Here's your other really big one is the nitroland. And then the last data bar is no earthworms at all. So you look at the number of saplings. There's a couple of half a sapling per square meter where there's snakeworms, and then you have three for the root stress-resistant mycorrhizal. There's no earthworms there, and now six or seven. So there is, in effect, one even economically important species. Let's get that slide. In water culture, there's a few places where you find them. So you find them in, actually, you find them in raised beds. You find them in mashed beds. And then you find them just in flower beds that have leaf mulch rather than woody mulch there. So that's really interesting. So they really don't care what they feed on. They are very flexible in their food sources. Anyway, so this one is an old picture of a deceased Shomi-e-supra. And water cultures that once there said things, the owner of this nursery says, I think that's the words that did that. This is the words. We don't really collect information about plant damage in nurseries. And that's probably one of the problems why maybe people are not willing to find this because there's no reason. Do you have any real data on damage on plant production? So this is the UPDM tree farm. So we are spreading it all the way around Burlington. So and then, of course, there's people like you who have plant sales and plant exchanges. Exchange safely, you know, that's the question that CSA says, there's friends and families that exchange plants. And so the most important thing is trying to exchange plants with bare roots. It's a real pain in the neck because washing roots of soil is really, really hard. If you've got wear ground with no mulch or no cover, are the same roots there? There's stick to be there. But basically, you put mulch on your feet with them. So you're going to get more. So the whole culture trade is what seems to be moving around globally. So the US current regulations say that you have to have bare root exchanges. Seeds and bare root comes from outside. So there's probably not new introductions into the US anymore. But within the US, there's already this huge pool of these worms that are moving around within the US. And then a friend of mine said, well, you know, I've bought it sometimes with gas oil. I've just smudged it. So that's that happening as well. I'm not sure how big a contribution that is. And it was about 15 years ago, there was a host of producer in Pennsylvania who had 30,000 host of varieties. And people thought that the demise of half of them or whatever it was, two thirds of them, was due to these worms changing the soil and not allowing the roots to have a hole in the soil. Another way that they move around is compost, which is a welcome near to my neighborhood in St. Almond's. And people, you know, in the fall, they rip their leaves and put them in these wheat bags. Wheat bags were the side of the road. So they picked some outtakes into the transfer station or people picked them to the transfer station themselves. And those who most likely have, whose army always have these worms, will most likely have these worms in them. And you can go to the transfer station, you can get free mulch, people do that. And there's certain places where I think the upper valley is one of the places where the municipalities give away leaf mulch. And so if you want to keep half leaf mulch, you can pick it up. Merceries get leaf mulch that way that they take out. And so you keep eating. This one block might even spread these worms over a large area, many gardens. Do you know whether commercial compost operations got hot enough to kill them? I'll get to that later. That's a great question. So actually, I'll get to this very now. So I'll get to this back to this maybe later on as well. So Ms. White has a large fish. So this is something I've got from the UVA that happened that caught me up. I sent an email saying, blah, blah, blah. This is a problem. Ms. White has a lot of flesh and blood in her scullet. Can't see a situation. About 30 bags of some compost. I don't know if you watch that. And spread them on the garden. She didn't notice worms at the time. This year, the garden is full of large, impressive worms that she produced out of this. And this is a test of what she's made online. And so she knows that they are very aggressive. Blah, blah, blah. Pick up the tail feature. Most is concerned in the swipe open and tap back of XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX But even what they're saying, it's probably not going to be very helpful in the end. Because once we move around, yes. What do they say? What's their control? What's their control is to keep things up really well. Oh, the heat. Yeah. So you have to get up to 140 or something like that to kill. The ones that will die... It's actually regulators. I mean, by regulation, farming, agricultural regulation, you have to have... Right. I think Johnson made municipal compost and product compost. That's the process. It's not just storming garbage in a pile. I understand that. So it's an organic certification that you have to have, and you have to reach 100 degrees of heat in seven days. It kills the eggs. It kills the eggs, and it also kills the worms. If the worms stay put where it's really hot. On the outside of the compost pile, it's actually just atmospheric temperature, so they move to a comfort zone. So in most compost piles, if they're there, you can reach in about 5 centimeters, 10 centimeters, 4 inches, and you can pull out worms. So they don't have much of a brain, but they're not down the list. So there's a problem with composters, and so taking care of the cocoons is probably virtually easy, because they don't move. So if you turn that compost several times, most likely you kill 99% of those cocoons. But the worms might move, and so as long as you have the compost, they'll produce more and more. But they screen it. Commercial compost. I mean, for a lot of compost, you buy it. Buy it. Buy it. And it's screened. I understand. I totally understand. And the screen would catch the eggs. I can ask those questions later. Okay. I was just going to comment. If the compost is on bare ground, they can move in and out from surrounding area. Right. So this is also... As opposed to a slab or something. So you have the time when the compost is hot and you have the time when the compost is cooling down, it's maturing, they call it. And that's also the time when that compost becomes vulnerable for re-evasion by these ones. There's a lot of problems with that. And I know that in Vermont, composts don't believe that this is a problem. So I don't know. History and current extent of the invasion. So part two, there's cherry blossoms there. Do you know where I'm going with that? No. So there's an anecdote that the cherry blossom or the trees, circular trees, that went to Wachengdu Sea in New York, from Japan. One of the ones that brought the particular snake homes that we have here, to New York. And so the first introduction was, I think, 1908. And the Japanese had not furigated their children. And so they were all destroyed because they were afraid of... Because a few years later, they destroyed them. And guess what? There's probably some worms that came over that ground. And then a second batch was actually probably furigated. So this is one of the anecdotes as to how did they micropot me here. Vermicomposting is another way of doing this. And so vermicomposting, you can buy these worms on the Vaman Jumpers, which is the same as snake worms. You can buy those on the internet. So this is... You can't do this in Wisconsin. You can't do it in New York anymore because there these things are traditionally regulated as invasive species. So you can't... You shouldn't... You can still do it. So those are different from the red ones? Different red ones. These are the jumper worms. These are the snake worms. And so there... So about five years ago, all these people were saying, oh, these are great worms. The ones that were wonderfully regarded in the area there, pixie dust in your flowers and pumpkin is going to be five times bigger. Now they kind of say, update environmental concerns of all the Vaman Jumpers. It should be noted that the Vaman Jumpers is surrounded by sudden controversy. The National Department feels that jumpers released into the wild caused serious threat to the ecosystem. Blah, blah, blah. The allegations, the last time allegations continues to imply that the Vaman Jumpers seriously interrupts the National Food Chain at its most critical level. And we're not taking sides in this debate, however, it's worth looking into. We recommend having a look at some of the research and discussion taking place. And once informed, decide for yourself. So it's not our fault, it's your fault. We've warned you. We've warned you this might be a problem. So now they want you to be more savvy about selling them on the internet. And I don't think that actually I've warned you that this is illegal, these are illegal species in some states. Joseph, our Alabama jumpers, are they same worms and pests? Yes, they are same worms and pests. Yeah, because it's used for a few different species. Is it not? Yes, I'll get to that. So they come from Japan, Korea, the ones that we have here, but there's also some that we tell why in China. There's other places in the U.S. that have different stories and they might be from China and Taiwan as well. So in Canada, there was one single report from 38 states here in the U.S. 37 states in the U.S. have jumpers. And there's a total of 16 species at this point. The earliest reports of jumpers from California, 1860, there's one or two species from there. And then, you know, you look at all the other, you know, probably other ones, I think the next closest one was 1914, I don't know, in the moment, 2009, 2012. And you go, where? We've seen those 20 years ago. What, 30 years ago? And that's very true. So these are first reports by people who have identified them. It doesn't mean that only because somebody identified them, that's the time when they were first introduced. So it's not first introduction but first reported in the states. But so it goes back about 150 years now, 160 years that they were introduced or at least seen in the U.S. So in the Northeast, the invasion treatment has these three species together. So if you look at a forest that's invaded, most likely you will find three species of jumpers. And weight, colors, as crazy snake was. Amethystokiensis, amethystegrestis, and metafied ebendorpha. And you notice there's two, there are two genera there. So there's four genera in the states. And a metafied ebendorpha used to be an amethystilkendorpha in that amethystokiensis used to be a metafiede tokyensis just to survive about four, five years ago. So they kind of move around in their taxonomy. It's kind of weird. How can you tell them apart? We'll get to that. So it's in here's 12 of the worms that exist here in the U.S. And the three that we're concerned with here in Vermont are amethystegrestis, which is the one at the top. Amethystokiensis, which is that one in the amethystokiensis, which is the largest one which is a really big worm is probably an amethystokendorpha. So you can't really tell them apart by just staring at them or even looking at their size because there's a big size variation in each population. And so what you have to look at is you have to look at the segments. And so this is an amethystegrestis. It's got these three cores between segments eight, seven, and five and four, six and five. So if you see these three these three cores between those segments coming from the nose are really difficult to see. It's a pain in the neck. So frequently you have to open up the worm to figure out what they are. Tokienis only has two of those and then an amethystokiensis is the easiest one to identify. It's got these different patches just about in eight and nine. So just about three or four segments ahead of the ring around the corner. So you can't identify them if they have these features. Not all of the worms have these features even though there might be these worms. It's extended north in the US and Canada. So these are long sites where they have been confirmed by some scientists that looked at them. So you notice there's nothing in South Carolina. There's plenty of them there. It was just that for some reason they didn't help us. And the dark area here the darker shaded grave is where they can be by temperature and precipitation. So the lighting area at the top there in Quebec, Ontario and so on is where the temperatures are too cold and the growing season is too short for them to mature. And you should know these are annual worms so they need to mature within the season. If they don't have 90 days of frost-free period then they will not propagate and comport them. So they can go even if you're really high up between once week and we extend that even in different units you could probably find them. They have not been found much in Canada on one site in Hamilton, Ontario. All right, so part three the source of genetic variation and so what you see there is a typical gel and Maryam Lurie Ein has produced this gel and it shows you one shows you one way of identifying these worms by genetic means so for example if the position of this band is right around here is the next higher band that you see there is the next higher band after that is the metaphor of the window and then sometimes we find that two bands that's really exciting because it doesn't match it's really neat so it's either someone contaminated that sample or something weird and wonderful that will make Maryam mention things so we don't know yet but she's working on it she's very excited so we show something about genotypes and phenotypes so genotypes are basically the genotypes are exactly the same DNAs or the sequences are pretty much the same it's the same like send DNA so if you look at these three lines these are three different genotypes and then if you look at this last graph three genotypes but they can change not their DNA but they can adapt to the environment so if you have like a handful of worms that have been 5 or 6 genotypes and you throw them into something that's slightly water than where you are then maybe only two of them survive because these two genotypes have the ability to adjust to the temperature variation so we call that plasticity we see a lot of plasticity in these worms and what they eat so there's some species that they really specialize in one thing but these worms can outcompete almost all soil so organisms because they can they can feed on different things so if you have something like a millipede feeding on something then these worms might actually switch over to feeding of what the millipedes have and outcompete them so that millipede is caught so they really lower the amount of acropods or creepy corollies in the soil when they are present so there are two words to make worms out of pathogenetic that means they don't have any different to make little babies and so there's some facts that you should know about pathogenetic worms, no sex means no recombination of the DNA and there should all be exact same clones so it's like clones flying around DNA should be the same the fact what you watch to think about is that these worms were everywhere in Japan in Korea and other species elsewhere in the East and in each location at some point in the past there were hermaphrodites of these species so they are any different and so there was recombination going on a while back that we know about so that means basically in each location in Japan you might have a different kind of clone with a different lineage and so when you I'll get to that in a second but so essentially if you take two worms from Japan from treated positions to locations then there might actually be very different genetic even though there are now pathogenetic worms they may just be clones we look at the genotypic variation in three different sites in Vermont so we have a place called Centennial Woods which is near the University of Vermont then HRC which is the Horticultural Research Center and then the Audubon Society and Hidington Hidington, thank you so we have the three sites and we got the worms from them and we ran different genetic tests of them this is the result of them so if you look at this table we have two species and here's the three sites CW Centennial Woods Horticultural Horticultural Horticultural Horticultural Horticultural Horticultural Horticultural Horticultural HALU and this is the number of genotypes out of that 49 there's 24 different genotypes so they're not all the same they're not all clones at what farm there was 10 out of 14 10 different genotypes out of 14 examples Audubon 37 different genotypes out of what three sites looks like huge that's really diverse how many of these two genes do we have a similar variation in the genotypes so how does that come about so our first hypothesis so you have all these people coming from many places and they all go to one place and from there they spread out in other places so you're Americans you understand that kind of concept so all the lineage is combined so for us for these ones it's some kind of nursery that bought a patent to come to town so all the genotypes combined in nurseries so here's all the different places in Japan where they have been found and so a tiny force comes from all these places that go into the nursery and then the nursery combined and then like two or three degrees and then with all the parts you get them into various places like Vermont or New Hampshire or Georgia or whatever and you have diversity right away so that's one hypothesis the other one is there is actually sex born and that's kind of controversial because it's sex but because it's more the fact that most people don't believe that these ones have sex and so if they had sex so in order to understand what might be going on you have to understand the way these creatures reproduce and it's complicated so you have so in order to have sex you have to have two worms and there's a couple of pores that are important these pores that are labeled SP they're called spermatheca there's a pre-welled bore right here on the criterion and then there's a male bore which is usually right behind it in order for this to work for them is they have to line up with the male pores with the spermatheca right there and then the male bore deposits sperm into the spermatheca first step then they can work in separate ways and eventually both worms will produce both worms do this at the same time so they're a mutual exchange of sperm and then at some point these worms will produce cocoons and the way that works is like this so here's a criterion that's down to for a cocoon around it so it's a gelatinous sheath and you notice that it becomes denser and moves forward towards the nose of this worm so while this forms around the criterion an egg or several eggs are deposited into this into this catella into this cocoon and then the cocoon moves forward and eventually it moves over the spermatheca and so the spermatheca will then deposit sperm into the cocoon and here you go and then the the cocoon just pitches off the nose and here's your cocoon that is now where do I stay again next time and you're going to get likely you're going to get one or two worms that develop so our second type of is there was they have sex impossible happens no one will recognize it so we have this thing with these these worms are really different look at five of them and you will find all sorts of different variations on the possession of sexual organs so that's what we call the choral reproductive spectrum so they're on the spectrum and this is what it looks like so two to five percent depending on the way you look in the world so five percent of the worms in a population will have full set of reproductive organs so technically there are hermaphrodites then there's also two to ten percent that miss male pores they don't have any male pores but they do have spermithesis so theoretically something with a male pore could combine with something that doesn't have a male pore but it does have spermithesis so there's about between four to fifty percent of the worms of your genetic diversity so most of these things are actually pathogenetic but 80 percent of them are pathogenetic you really have to look hard to find the ones that have a full set of reproductive organs it's pretty crazy so what's wrong with that picture what's wrong with that picture is that most of the real experts in the field would say they don't have sex but how many of you have sat down and watched worms for a couple of days to see whether they have sex basically like no one would like to know I don't I don't I don't know if it's an integer report that's an integer report that's an integer report in terms of not what they used to be they're soft ones so these guys that have sex they're kind of texting their friends and then they miss it anyway so it could also be a pathogenetic report and this happens so all the deniers come together in nursery and then they have sex and then they have more relation okay we get into the control of our forms so that would be very hard to do this because there's a lot of snake worms in your garden or in the nursery and so cruel is not less of a cruel and other ways of getting there but it's more direct more like you have to be a pacifist so there's some hopeful new developments one is alfalfa meal and it took me about 10 minutes to get alfalfa I was with alfa anyway so alfalfa meal alfalfa meal is one there's a complication she works for a number of outfits one is a public public garden kind of like a different kind of but she has a lot of these worms and she wants to give it up because it's for these people out in the garden and so she she looks at the ocean organics and she wants to search fertilizer that has these and then they kill these worms and she says why are these worms why are they being killed by this strange 1-0-0 fertilizer so she finds out that there's proponents in there and the proponents are inherited to them to the point where the skin gets scorched and the worms die through them but she said you know I remember from my horticultural days at school that many plants have proponents in there so it's not just the tea tree that the proponents are derived from in the early bird fertilizer but there's other things and she found that alfalfa is also particularly high in these proponents of horse feet something like that and it falls right around and they're kind of pellets and she said that she had killed quite a few worms in that process I'm spreading that but she kind of waters in there and the pellets start to disintegrate and then there's death and destruction Does it kill the other worms? Well the other worms are just as bad It's just they don't There's a free time to go Doesn't that have a carriage burn? Well the reason why I show that is because that is being killed by something called Poveri Vasianan and that's an entomopathogenic fungus which means it kills insects in the lab and so microchrome is one of them there's quite a few formulations that people buy so we tried this out we tried this out in the lab and this is how creatures die where the fungus takes over and they pull the back and die so we had a biopsy designed around Poveri Vasianan and so we had a treatment so when you do this experience you have 15 treatments at least one was a control treatment so the first control treatment was nothing is out to that treatment except for replacing water that's been lost through evaporation then we had another treatment that had no Poveri Vasianan but it had mitis and so the reason why the mitis enters into this picture is because in order to this is one of the theories in order for that Poverian to stick around for longer you have to give it something that happens to be one of the things that has been tried and that's been shown true to labs that need of that Poveria that it can help the Poveria just to go on for longer so no Poveria but we added the mitis and then we also had two treatments of Poveria Vasianan on the mitis grains so you actually have to cook the mitis you have to make sure the mitis you have to water it and then you grow the Poveria Vasianan on it and so there's two treatments one amount and double the amount of the minute being added and then we also just did Poveria Vasianan and when I say weeded I mean Mariana and one of her helpers was a Chinese student from China now who helped her with that but she also had this Poveria Vasianan that was the suspended in horticultural liquid and it was very long so solid formulations and the liquid formulations there was 15, we replicated each one between 15 times there's a ton of buckets there that you see in containers actually and 3.6 juvenile and this was a per replicant into the treatments and then we put it in a greenhouse and the greenhouse was cut out between 15 and 23 degrees which went up in diameter so in order for this to work we actually had to use pots so the ones couldn't squirm up and there really could be stick out of anything so one thing that worked for another was to actually put hook up wire around the inside of the pots so they couldn't crawl up but the tension and the suction between the wall and the side of the swarm was broke you got two of them and they can't just go over they have to go over twice they don't seem to be able to do that and in addition to that we put some window mesh on top of that and greenhouse mesh so that they couldn't crawl up into the bottom as well so it goes a lot like this and those are the white specks that's the buberia pasiana grown on a minute and so the results were really really cool we found that so the white axis has mortality on it so what's the percentage of them that die and then here's the treatments control with water there was some mortality so it's a mortality that happens because worms die so what you have to do is you have to check this mortality of the control against the mortality of the other ones is this mortality actually higher than that and so in more cases of the pasiana treatment that the treatment was greater than the control but what we found was that the mortality of the worms of the treatment was greater than the control that means that hasn't happened then for the control with the millet there was a lot less death and destruction less mortality and so one of the reasons why this might happen is because the millet is actually good food for these worms so anything you add to your soil that is organic they will feed on and so it will help them come back so we then looked at also that how many of those juveniles have become adults and so this particular treatment with the control with the millet pretty much everything that was alive in there have become adults so feeding them as the country comes shows you if you feed them with mulch or by increasing your organic matter it's basically increasing the number of creatures what is the time frame that frame was two weeks and then check this is the final outcome and check every three days I think how many have survived did you compare it against the alfalfa treatment? we didn't so I've come to a profit limit that was a different experiment so we killed the worms but there is this really hard experience and I I'm also on the right hand side is the moist ones on the left hand side is the dry ones and so this is why their party they can lose water so neither drought nor frost can do them harm they will not develop when they are in the stage so embryos that are in these cocoons are not developing during the time when they are in the stage where the cocoons are dehydrated but as soon as they are rehydrated that embryonic development continues and eventually they will hatch and it takes about 600 degree days phase 5 so it's about 1000 degree days far and high at phase 40 that's it so another question that we had was is there a cocoon back that's like a seed back right so could they survive for longer than just one season and so we counted we counted the the cocoons in the forest over an entire season and you notice that regardless of season there was always a fair number 500 cocoons per square meter of course they say well they are not all biographies so there's a lot of technical things there they can't possibly be all biographies so let's have a look at the next so Marianne being who she is she likes to have meticulous things going on so she said I'm going to dissect 400 cocoons and see what stage they're at through the seasons and so she defined some stages so this is the stage where there's just the argument the fluid that feeds the embryo from there and there's another stage the embryo is slightly elongated you can see some segmentation already in stage 3 it's longer, stage 4 is even longer it's becoming more pigmented and then at stage 5 it's very pigmented and it's the size of a hatch and so if you now do this for many different months of the year you should get an idea of what is happening during those months are there any cocoons in the wintertime for example that can hatch are there any cocoons in the summer that can hatch and she defined ready to hatch as these two stages this color here is ready to hatch from January all the way through December there's always some that are ready to hatch March April unfortunately we don't have any data March is very few to hatch but they tend to hatch a lot March and April and May then in June there's ought to hatch just every month you find that they are ready to hatch which is a sign that there might be a cocoon back there's always something that hatches so if they're in that stage where they're ready to hatch they would be vulnerable to death they're vulnerable to death all the time but I mean if they're in a cocoon state they're less likely to die than if they're already so in environmental circumstances if they get to that point where they're ready to hatch and then the circumstances aren't right they carry right if they actually hatch into a bad bad tide of the years in the wintertime they do hatch in the wintertime you've seen it but the temperature has to be something like 50 degrees to hatch so you're looking at January thaw or something like that where the temperatures rise in the wintertime and then they come out and then what they don't know is that the next day or the day after that the month is back with like minus 20 or something and they die so they're safe in the cocoon once they stick their nose out they're in trouble so one reason why that is important is because the growing season is lengthening as climate change goes on and so most of that lengthening is happening in the springtime to that point where some people that are in production side of things they're saying eventually there's going to be one maple syrup season and it's going to be around Christmas because the growing season has extended so much and so these words can take advantage of these shorter winters and say okay short winter I'm good and then they get more time to develop and that means that they have longer time as adults to produce cocoons which means that the following year and then the next year so cocoons are much harder to build so Maria and E.E. also put cocoons into little teabags and then the burrows in the same pots and then they looked at how these cocoons how much the cocoons were in the end of the experiment so there is a difference between the basiana treatment and the control treatments in terms of mortality but you talk about 30 cent mortality cocoons are much harder when the worms are it's really hard for something to go through those the cocoon shells so at some point we also looked at the naturally occurring pathogens and for that Maria opened up cocoons to which she collected dead worms it's really difficult to find dead worms so she went really hard at that once decomposed really quickly and then but if you see a dead worm or one that is really really sick to die in minutes or something like you pick it up and then you can extract you can grind it up you extract isolate pathogens from that well bacteria bacteria fungi from that sample she also did this from from cocoons so this is a malformed embryo that is diseased by something probably fungus and she extracted or isolated things from that as well so we have now a special egara that selects for particular for particular bacteria fungi and so she found three that were actually pretty good there's a there's four treatments here control treatment mucidium staphococcus and bacillus strains we don't know which strain they are but they came from either a worm or a cocoon and the different colors the time frame so the blue is 96 hours after application of the of the pathogen 144 hours is the the orange and then 240 hours is the that is the gray and you notice in the beginning nothing is happening these not 96 hours there's really not much mortality but after 24 hours 40 hours you actually have pretty good mortality so the problem with these naturally occurring pathogens is that nobody has tested before whether humans are affected by so penicillium so penicillin people are allergic staphococcus there are some staphon connections and bacillus there's a whole bunch of diseases that go with that as well so we are really not happy with taking those out into the field but Joviere Bassiana is regarded as an agent that this was a concern and EPA actually has given horticultural sleep that's given them the permission to use it without much oversight so subtilist is there anything so are there promising agents or are there some that are based on components T.C. Nextrakas he only worked R. 12 at the most feet that Jim Campbell has tried out and then there's a mastiff that washed the mastiff at the worm the worm would die the solid disruptors like really sharp sands some construction sands might work and then biochar might also work what are the natural predators in the asianic habitat good question we don't know so generally there is salamanders and sparrows and we went to Japan and worked with some people in Hawaii so how does the biochar work how does it work do they ingest it like sand or they have to crawl over it they ingest the salamander disrupts the gut the same with biochar has to be particular biochar is the right size and perfectly fine and people recommend to use hardwood biochar to use what with biochar hardwood biochar what about diatomaceous earth that's been shown most of the work it does not I don't know why it shouldn't be right same idea so I tried some other things there are four treatments there's biochar which is alfalfa based products and then there's alfalfa bio which is ground up stuff we had six replicas for treatment and six was for replicas and we looked at it the same day that we applied it nothing happened seven days later and 16 days later and so these are the results each one of these segments that's related by one of these slides it's a time that we sampled so zero days is one seven days and 16 days so it takes a while for any of these things to really have an effect again it's mortality on the scale so zero to 100% and the best was actually the biochar the next one was the furry fans and the alfalfa meal didn't have an effect it didn't work alright so and then the last part of this talk is how do we get involved right so one of the ways you can do this is by if you have seen a snake worm take a picture of it and upload it to a database with coordinates so there's different ways to get coordinates if you have a cell phone it usually gives you the location thing on, gives you coordinates or the other way to do it is figure out where you are and look at Google Maps for example and there's two there's probably quite a few more but these two have been used frequently to do emit this I am not a bit invasive there is a vermon version of this so every state has a version and at the moment the vermon version is not really working well because it takes a person to give you permission to have an account you have to have an account to collaborate on this and for some reason that's not happening so I try to sign up so I can show you this now and I didn't get any email from anybody I'm not an account I'm not an account yet but I was assured by somebody else who has worked with these databases that in April this year they would make that account signing up for accounts automatic so you just sign up for it and you will sign up Who is registering this site? It's the Department of Environmental Conservation for the month but it's a nationwide site there's no vermon support there's not part of any government it's a separate site it's just a person who has to press a button why do you need to press a button when you have a computer to press a button? that's what they're trying to do this is April so once that has happened once that has happened I will create a specific project and you can report to that project on imappinbasics.org but I will send you the structures I'll get involved I'll send the structures to the entire so the other thing the way you can get involved is through collaborations many of the the state and federal agencies that look at pasts they distinguish between two kinds of collaborators there's collaborators that actually do something and then there's stakeholders that are affected by that so if you were to sign up as a gardener and you said I can give you some space to spread the boberia basiana then you were a collaborator if you were a gardener then you say I'm interested in that but I'm not going to collaborate if there are some results then you were a stakeholder seen for nurseries seen for landscapers so one of the things that we're really interested in is some verifiable damage reports that means you see the worms, you see the damage that we have not seen before to a plant and you report that there's always a question is it the worm or something else but that would be the important so I would say here's a risk of cancer happening at least then you don't need it to to these earthworms so the other way is then you report them into trials you are willing to be part of the trial and for home gardeners it's the same thing nurseries and home gardeners should report the same kind of information or get involved in trials so if you're always looking for some of the people that's willing to sacrifice their plants on the lawn that's not a good point to who to me or I'll give instructions on that I'm not going to base this on so you bring cocoons into someone's garden for the trials no no no will you sacrifice your plants no you should sacrifice your plants to the master solution or the or the or biochar but I was trying to be funny I was trying to be funny about sacrificing your plants I mean it's like being like being a how can you test something if you don't have the worms you would have to have the worms to be able to you would if you have them then that's bad for you but that might be good for the project so you can also get involved in collections and workshops so participate whenever the workshop is offered and we get some funding through the federal government and there's funding in there for workshops where you can learn how to identify these worms and and how you can participate in new research and that's all about the funding of course and then there's other challenges you can so working with product culture is really difficult because on the one hand most product specialists that have them in their nurseries nursery orders they say we don't want them really because there may be some kind of regulation on coming up I don't think they want this to happen anytime soon but Wisconsin and York have them even California they have listed these worms as invasive and in agriculture even and then this customer side becoming more sensitive to these worms you know they say well I'd rather not have these worms I'll find them in the nursery or something I don't know but there's still a key interest to get rid of them and in some cases to cooperate with the researchers and then the funding which you know what is your problem you know why do you even mention others to us when you want money for pest control isn't really your problem it can't be that bad you know there's no major on plant damage as I mentioned before there's no stakeholders that come forward there's no money then there's of course what is the economic damage threshold which you have to come into control so an IPM second integrated pest management the wisdom for this is the level of infestation if it's too low to deal with if you're not really using much of your crop then you're not intervening but if it's really high there's a point where you say actually it's worth your while intervening at this point you're going to lose 60-70% of my crop at this level of infestation and so we don't know that for this but we know that for all sorts of incentives but not for these forms so how do you convince the state and federal agencies that this is an important issue right so here's a typical review we get applicants are well positioned in the industry evaluate the problem and send them findings and results that's good right so just reading that after that sorry we're not finding you why not we are well positioned in the industry proposals funded is focused on a single issue and this succinct create a problem given the damage down in states like minnesota could have huge impacts on major industry 80-100% damage that means the university will be well provided indicators for outcome in the job interest demonstrates that they are prepared to do the work so data applicants has not convinced that this is a problem in the world so you know after you write 300 graphs and they are showing what they are saying and I always refer to what you would say but anyway so it's mainly for vegetable so some of these grants are for especially other crops for the cultures part of that but it's usually the vegetable these these grants and anyway so here's the other one, especially crop stakeholders described seem to be those already involved in the project so we have a letter from Greenworks and they said we have this many new members and you know we're willing to collaborate and find people that are willing to do the tests and they're saying well then Greenworks and all those people are collaborators and they're saying there's no stakeholders in this statement anyway so this is tough so do you know any recent chemistry that's actually how we got this funding through the application through recent chemistry that's actually true yeah I don't know but this helps because the chemistry will then talk about it but I don't alright questions one two questions I hate killing all so you need to remind me why the other ones aren't good because they're doing the same thing so if they get into the woodlands and the very first damage to my forests by earthworms was done by European earthworms you walk through the forests in the Champlain Valley most of the time you find four or five or six species of European earthworms and they have done the damage they're just much slower I don't know how slow they are we don't know they've been pretty fast three years and they've worked through the death layer all the years have been taught it's really difficult to get rid of that if you were in the south you could say that well there's worms here that are negative and I don't even want to kill them and then you have a point so for these worms if you're in the forest sometimes they're the only worm that's left in the forest because they are competing the other ones they're really good at competing with other creatures the temperature when did they die from freezing they died in the morning not on the polar vortex by the time the polar vortex comes by they're already dead because the winter the winter in general they're not around them they're annual creatures so they only live from as well as from April to maybe the beginning of December maximum so every time we have frost so here in Toronto late September early early October the worms die but the cocoons don't the cocoons will still be around the cocoons we have temperatures here in the soil itself it's right minus 24 about four years ago minus 24 minus 30 far amount and the cocoons survived they desiccate so the way the embryos die is that they're froze and there are crystals forming, water crystals forming inside the embryo that disrupts the cells and they die but because they are desiccating in the wintertime there's no crystals forming whatever one and two I have a question about the control with the alfalfa I couldn't miss part of that slide you found that there really wasn't a big difference in alfalfa between the alfalfa that was around up and the control yes there was not really any difference so my question is we have to breathe hives that's where they're staying over wintertime and it's just constantly feeding them and my thought at the bulletin was maybe that's a possibility of putting the alfalfa around the outer edges of it but you're saying it's not really going to matter so I should try seems that the alfalfa and we don't know why that is but the alfalfa works when it's not ground up pellets pellets seem to work and the ground up the meal doesn't seem to work at all and it's this no good reason why that should be so what do they put on the pellets to make the pellets I don't know mostly it's just compression just compression just like most of the animal pellets in the grade that you buy question about how that affects other on the pellets in this life and other just careers you have to be a critter that feeds on organic materials and it's probably not the feeding that's the problem it's more that they touch the pellets with their bodies that irritates the skin and that might kill them okay so the other thing that she can mention they're talking about the actual damage to the plant what I find with our clients is the extensive actually having their gardens mulched a two inch layer mulch doesn't last a whole season and it's incredibly expensive I mean there's spending a couple of thousand dollars every year we used to do it every year we now have to do it every year and this is the part that I often see with the bird control world is it's sort of nickel and diming the um I don't understand the damage of deer and how we support the hunting community because you know you miss a few you miss a few and if they deal you collectively take what it costs to have a pest like a deer all of these worms and I don't know how that's if there's anyone looking at the cost of them outside the actual plants yeah so does this cost apparently cost money right so you would have to have an economist how much does this cost not just you as the as the landscape person that cost is passed on to the customer and then there's another part that costs this actually societal cost when that wood is being composed you're generating nutrients so if the plants can pick it up or if the plants don't pick it up then excess nutrients that is produced will run off in a big storm or it will reach into groundwater and so there's another side to this which is societal cost so if it's not with us then maybe it's the next generation that I don't know it's actually more complicated and that's why these things cost money there would have to be a trial somewhere where you can have different plots with different amounts of earthworm science to figure out what is an economic threshold at which you say there's too many earthworms here because that march is appearing much quicker so you have to have to set that up so it costs money and no risk that's part of the list so many other problems climate change starving people and that's really a good point so how big is this problem can we tolerate it compared to all these other bigger problems that are out there in my case it's the first form of fire I didn't let it stay at gardens and nobody really needs it two questions how tiny are the cacodas they are between and four millimeters which is a 12th and an eighth of an inch that's male it does and the other one is can we throw these into water while they drown the cacodas they would drown eventually if you have to figure out how they don't crawl out of your container it's really a horrible slur anything I was just going to say about how to get them not to crawl out of your containers because what we do in my crew is we have five gallon buckets and we just grab a bunch of mulch and put just a thin bit of mulch and if they have that and the bottom of the five gallons they won't climb out they don't have mulch they're out before you put the next one in I'm not experienced I did that I started out collecting them for you I don't remember all the details but I had water in the bottom of the five gallon bucket and I threw them in there trying to figure out what I was going to do and they did they did die and they didn't crawl out but as you will say it's a terrible smell it wasn't pleasant I think we're throwing them into the swamp in the pond yeah that would happen yeah it didn't and this smell is horrendous we do these tests on mortality by assays it's just many of them so you walk in the greenhouse went to the lab and you smell and say oh yes some have died but I just stopped counting so for Ms. Y. O'Callis she stated that they're aggressive and seem intelligent they seem to come after you yes that too can you talk more about biochar because I was just about to start using it because I've read some really good reports but can you just talk a little bit more about how biochar benefits our soul oh that's a really good question so biochar was really big came into its own in the early 2000s maybe a little bit earlier than that as a way of capturing carbon and burying that carbon in the soil as a way of sequestering carbon so biochar is very resilient to breaking down further so basically biochar can produce any kind of organic material as produced in the same way as charcoal it's supposed to smolder it until it stops so it's stabilized so that means you're burning it at really low temperatures at low temperatures 600 degrees Celsius or something like that low oxygen content so you're not combusting it it's really a smolder and how is it so that's how you have this organic waste what you're going to do with it you can either give it to a composter the CO2 carbon dioxide comes out of it because it's being composed further and further and put back on the land and it's great for that but it will break further so if you have all this waste and you want to keep it in the soil you have to stabilize that organic carbon and you do that by this biochar process so that's why it was becoming big in the 90s in the early 2000s and then gardeners and organic vegetable growers got a hold of this idea and the thought was it's people found this area in Brazil where there was these dark soils these charred soils high carbon, high stable carbon things called terropreta several of these terropreta and it's really really fertile soil and so I said why don't we use that that same thing let's produce this biochar and bury it in gardens so there's a couple of things actually to know about biochar so people talk about it very enthusiastically some people have really good experiences with biochar different kinds of biochar and some people have to see any effect and it really depends on how the biochar is produced and what is produced from so the oxygen content of the reactor has to be just right to produce the right kind of biochar and then whatever you have in it also has to be the right kind of structure it has to be I don't know but what people find is that some of the things that have attributed to biochar will develop over time so sometimes you put it in and you don't see any increase in exchange capacity which is one of the ways that you can store nutrients in the soil at all but then after 10 years people say I've got a greater kind of exchange capacity so it might take some time to develop in what kind of biochar you're using then another thing that people worry about in biochar is that it may have an effect like worms and that might be positive or negative depending on how you produce so the worms eat it or just slide it they eat it the theory is that they eat it maybe it absorbs other toxins because it's an absorbent it's a filter that's another good point I don't know about that people haven't gotten enough real science on it because this is not real science this is just basically a trial and we see an effect but why is that effect there people think it's the disruption of the gut by sharp edges on hardware biochar that's a theory but it could also be that something is released from that biochar as the biochar goes through the gut of the earth I wonder if it's not even on the external part of the body because you were speaking earlier about how much it gets polluted it just explodes I don't know I haven't seen anything explode yet but there's another thing about coming back to your initial question so nowadays people co-compose biochar with compost and that is supposed to load that biochar with nutrients so all the cations are basically in the casserole so it's supposed to have a better effect than if you would just add biochar so add your biochar add it to your compost pile turning it and then put that in there it depends on how you compost so if you have just a compost in the backyard then for the year or something then you think you've already been compost I want to fast maybe if you have more questions you can take them back otherwise thank you so much for being up to date you posted through how you left the biochar but we can connect your work with us right that's a good suggestion well I can post things on this sort as well absolutely yes well you can do it yeah I get it