This is Big Bad news for Good Little Earthworms

After a light rain in April the Chairman of Montagu’s Nature Garden was fiddling around in his own garden at Badshoogte when he found and photographed the creature you see here. At 36cms long (about three times the size of the image at right) it seemed a worthy subject of enquiry. So Christopher Powell sent it off to Montagu Mail where Sol, our Internet Researcher, came up with an intriguing story.

  The creature is a worm and not a very nice one. Its scientific name is Bipalium kewense but you can call it a hammerhead worm, which is what it is mostly known as. Not that it is all that well-known around here. It is an alien, an immigrant from Indochina that has spread to many other parts of the world, probably in pot plants.

The hammerhead is not in any way dangerous to human beings or pets, although there have been reports of some form of allergic skin reaction to the mucus it exudes. Its main threat is to the earthworms on which most gardeners depend for a healthy soil bed - kewense eats them. Earthworms are pretty well all it eats in fact and it has a great appetite. It can grow to half-a-metre and thus takes quite a bit of filling. It has a unique method of eating, which involves dissolving its prey bit by bit. The mouth locks onto the victim and powerful digestive enzymes go to work right there so that it swallows only the enriched juices.

Like earthworms, hammerheads live in the soil and are active at night, although they sometimes come out of the ground and lie around in puddles and damp spots after rain.

According to some reports, these little killers have actually destroyed whole worm farms in Europe.

They can survive in all conditions, from scorching hot to freezing cold, so long as there is moisture. They would probably not survive in the more arid parts of the Karoo.

 So what do you do if you find one?

The first thing to keep in mind is this: if you attempt to chop it up or even smash it to death, the pieces will likely all regenerate. Chop one into seven pieces and you will end up with seven new worms!

They have to be dissolved completely. Salt, vinegar and citrus oil have proved effective, but they cannot be just spread around the habitat. You must apply them directly to the worm in order to be effective. Spray the worm with vinegar or citrus oil, or pour salt onto it and you should see it begin to dissolve quite quickly.

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