I wish I could say that over the years I've gained some insight into the intelligence of my worms, but the most I've seen them do is act out of instinct or hunger, moving up to higher ground in the bin if water pools in the bottom, or gravitating towards food they like and away from food they don't. If they have an intellect, I don't suppose I've provided much to stimulate it.

People ask me, why bother cataloging earthworms? Well, why catalog anything? It's how we learn about the world we live in. Besides, some of these worms are going extinct. How do you know what you're losing if you don't know what you have?

Why is it that a worm can regrow most of its body, but we can't replace so much as a finger? I am left with the troubling conclusion that the worm's survival may, in the grand scheme of things, be more important than my own.

Sometimes I wonder if it is too much of an imposition on earthworms to push them into polluted ground, or to force-feed them a particular bacteria because we'd like to see it spread around. Darwin noticed that humans tend to exploit any characteristic for their own good, writing that "in the process of selection man almost invariably wishes to go to an extreme point." Are we taking advantage of earthworms? Shouldn't we clean up our own messes, or learn not to make them in the first place?