The assignment was to spend five minutes exploring each of three microhabitats and recording which of the four (overlapping) groups of worms you had found there. The four groups are:
Anecic earthworms Deep-burrowing earthworms - live in vertical burrows,going down to 2m. They are the largest and are darkly pigmented.
Endogeic earthworms Shallow-burrowing earthworms. They come to the surface less often as they eat mainly soil and live in horizontal burrows. They are medium to large and often pale in colour.
Epigeic earthworms Surface-dwelling earthworms which live in leaf litter or the top layer of the soil. They are smaller and usually dark in colour.
Composting earthworms High organic content microhabitat specialists - they love compost and are often stripey.
One of the three microhabitats had to be 'turnover' - under stones, logs, flowerpots etc.
In this habitat, I found pale endogeic worms and some anecic worms.
I looked in leaf litter in the wood and found no worms but that one cast, which I mentioned in a previous post. A sign of an anecic worm perhaps.
My third location was the high organic compound pile of leaves and soil and seeds at the end of my garden - a sort of compost heap at the end of the path.
This was worm heaven. I saw all categories of worm except the anecic.
Someone was rather hopeful that he might benefit from the survey.
Fascinating! Well done on the assignment, and thanks to you, I know more about classifying earthworms then I did before. In your "worm heaven" photo on the left, there's one with lots of stripes - so is that the compost type? So none in the leaf litter in the woods. Was the leaf litter drier than the other sites? Love the attentive, curious (hungry ?) bird photo xxx