What I find most interesting about many "little known facts" is not the fact itself but rather the fact that anyone came up with the fact in the first place. The factoid that most recently struck me is the science behind "worm grunting." For those of you who aren’t up on this, worm grunting is a way to get worms to come up out of the ground and into your waiting hands. You pound a stick into the earth and then pull a steel bar across its top. The vibrations it then experiences do two things. First, they create a sound that’s kind of like a low grunting. And they also send vibrations into the soil. These vibrations apparently sound/feel an awful lot like those produced by moles – the kind that love to munch on worms. And, just like flying fish will jump out of the water to escape a predator and make quicker time in the air, so do the worms "jump" out of the ground and slither across the soil.
It’s at this point that the worm grunter nabs them, stuffs them in a bucket, and later sells them to fishermen looking for fresh worm bait. You can find a soul-stirring video of it here.
But how?! How did anyone ever come up with this? Were they idly running a bar of steel on a buried stump and noticed worms fleeing in all directions? Did someone think – hey, maybe if I did this it’ll scare all the worms from the ground? Neither seems all that likely. But SOMEBODY figured it out.
To me it’s just another demonstration of the fact that over lots and lots of time, people will stumble upon just about anything.
- And that’s today’s word from the bird
