Worm hunting!

We had a great time looking for worms on Saturday with Kieron Brown, earthworm expert & the National earthworm recorder. 15 volunteers joined us to comb through the soil & count all the worms we found. We sampled 3 sites across Grove Farm, digging 5 holes in each place to look for worms. The meadows were quite dry and not so good for finding worms but we found a good spot in the woods.

Kieron identified 9 different species of earthworm - there are 30 in total in the UK. 3 types noted as rare, but this maybe more to with the fact that most previous data was gathered on agricultural land. Kieron says he find these “rarer” species quite often in London.

We then ended the day helping to create data to train AI to identify worms. We all took different photos of some worms we had collected to contribute to the training data set. The hope is that it might help farmers identify worms on their farms and understand more about their ecology. It will be interesting to see if it can.

Thanks to all our volunteers for coming & helping create worm records for Grove Farm. If you’d like to join us in the future, Kieron will be coming back for another recording day next April. Keep a look out on our events page.