As above. Sorry if this is a silly question!
I realise there is no ‘point’ to any particular animal or plant, but you often find that various species provide some sort of benefit (e.g. plants giving out oxygen, those birds that clean crocodiles’ teeth, spiders eat a lot of flies).
I just wondered if worms are particularly ‘useful’, because they don’t seem to do much from what I can tell
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Dude earthworms are like the number one most important insects which eat dead stuff and make fertile stuff out of it.
If your question wouldve been about like mosquitos I’dve agreed with the sentimemt, but man, worms are BROS
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Earthworms are decomposers. They help break down dead plants and turn them into soil, and distribute nutrients deeper into the soil for alive plants to use. Earthworms don’t exist in all environments, and other invertebrates or fungi do the decomposing instead. But decomposers in general are essential for life to continue, or we’d all be covered in hundreds of meters of dead leaves.
Worms are basically tiny wood chippers that go around blending up anything that gets scooped into them and spitting out (most of) it. Worms eat all of the leaves and stuff and help break it down into dirt. Fungus and bacteria do the same thing, but at a slower rate. These piles of leaves served as homes to bugs, lizards, frogs, spiders, etc and gave protection for a lot of seeds and plants growing under it. The America’s lost all of their worms in the last ice age and forests adapted to not having them. Since they’ve been brought back, forests have adapted back to having them. Worms don’t do anything crazy, but do affect biodiversity. Having them all disappear would really just make us upset that there’s leaves everywhere
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Basically, earthworms keep top soil from becoming dirt. We couldn’t live without them. There would be no food. The world’s food production depends on a healthy balance of bacteria, microbes, bugs, earthworms and an entire micros-environment on the top layer of fertile soil. One way farmers can show their healthy soil is by digging a hole (just push a shovel in the ground and tilt really) and showing earthworms. No worms = no life = dirt.
Well it depends on which earthworm – in North America we have invasive worms which can actually damage the forest topsoil by basically eating too much. But generally speaking the sheer amount and variety of life in the top 2 feet or so of soil is staggering. There are so many near microscopic little worms and insects and things that don’t have names that it would make your head spin. We take “life on earth” for granted and tend to focus on megafauna – I mean we are megafauna after all. But life both in the ocean and the soil is built on a pyramid of microscopic and then near microscopic organisms including worms. If one worm disappeared prob nothing would happen no. If all worms disappeared we’d be in. Trouble
To answer OPs question from a gardening perspective: earthworms, as well as all other bugs like earwigs or even aphids are beneficial to the garden in a variety of ways. For worms, they aerate the soil which keeps it loose and well draining and they eat dead plant tissue, animal tissues whatever, and then they poop, and that poop is usually left behind in the soil as they chug along for plant roots to utilize.
They also are great for composting, and you get worm tea (their pee) and worm castings (their poop) for fertilizer for your plants.
essentially think of it like this:
If you ever had a hamster as a kid and it died and you put it in a box and buried in the ground then a few months to a year later you notice the wild grass or flowers are doing REALLY well right where you buried the hamster? That’s because of worms! (And mycelium but still) that ate it, and then digested it, and pooped it out.
apart from all mentioned above, these worms make channels in the soil so rain water can penetrate deep and doesn’t run off at the surface
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