Can we live on worms alone? Probably not, find scientists

Diet of worms?

The phrase “diet of worms” intrigues people (if it intrigues them at all) in various ways. For historians, it can trigger arguments about a political convocation that happened in the city of Worms, in Germany in the year 1521. For nutritionists, the phrase can describe the work of scientists who are considering whether all of today’s 8 billion or so humans could, if need be, subsist on a diet of mainly earthworms.

Henry Miller, James Mulhall, Lou Aino Pfau, Rachel Palm and David Denkenberger, whom Feedback regards as the all-star team of the nutritional-diet-of-worms community, recently feasted on a mass of data. Postprandially, intellectually speaking, they produced a study called “Can foraging for earthworms significantly reduce global famine in a catastrophe?” It appears in the journal Biomass.

The five analysed four techniques for efficiently fishing, so to speak, for earthworms: “digging and sorting, vermifuge application, worm grunting, and electroshocking”.

They asked the “can” (of worms) question: Can the worms gathered by these methods feed all of us humans, given the constraints of “scalability, climate-related barriers to foraging, and pre-consumption processing requirements”? Their answer, in a word: no.

Their answer in 48 words: “The authors are not aware of any studies of the human health impacts of consuming a diet rich in foraged earthworms. However, in the authors’ opinion, there is reasonable evidence that such a diet could be harmful and so should not be recommended unless starvation is the alternative.”

Diets of worms

Miller, Mulhall, Pfau, Palm and Denkenberger are but the most recent front-runners in a long parade of scientists drawn to investigate diets of worms.

Many others have focused on the diets of the worms themselves.

Charles Darwin attained some measure of his fame for the 1881 book The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms. Nearly a century later, Kristian Fauchald and Peter Jumars’s “The diet of worms: A study of polychaete feeding guilds” occupied 92 pages of the Oceanography and Marine Biology Annual Review.

Fauchald and Jumars included a conversation-stopper of a sentence that is worth memorising and spouting if you want to worm your way into the spotlight at a party: “Alciopids are holoplanktonic animals with muscular, eversible pharynges.”

Other scientists studied what can happen when one eats worms, especially if one isn’t a human.

In 2002, Mary Silcox and Mark Teaford examined the teeth of some habitual worm-eaters. They wrote up their observations, for the Journal of Mammalogy, under the title “The diet of worms: An analysis of mole dental microwear“.

“We compared microwear from shearing facets of lower molars from Parascalops breweri (the hairy-tailed mole) and Scapanus orarius (the coast mole) with that from other small mammal species including a tenrec, a hedgehog, 3 primates, and 2 bats.”

Some of the mole tooth wear patterns, they write, can be “plausibly explained by the interaction between teeth and soil from the inside and outside of earthworms”.

Silcox and Teaford’s mole teeth research would take on new significance if and when – despite the warning given by Miller et al. – the peoples of Earth opt for a mostly earthworms dietary regimen.

The tall and short of it

News about height requirements for certain courses at Vietnam National University’s school of management and business (HSB) has Feedback wondering.

Deutsche Welle reported on 2 July that “female students must be at least 1.58 meters tall and male students at least 1.65 meters to be considered for admission this year”. The reasoning here: “the school aims to train future leaders and excellent managers” and “height is a decisive factor, especially when it comes to leadership and self-confidence”.

That news report says that after public outcry, “HSB adjusted its admission criteria” so that “the rule now applies only to one course, Management and Security”.

What schools or other institutions in the science, medical or tech world have managed to secure strict height prohibitions for students or employees? If you know of one, please send documentation to Feedback with the subject line “Big/Small Careers”. Some job requirements sensibly specify that applicants be physically able to use some particular job-related equipment. Don’t send those. Feedback craves examples in which numbers, not needs, rule the day.

Toilet humour

Inspired by Feedback’s collection of abandoned organisational slogans, Ken Taylor takes note of a slogan about things that were abandoned.

“I live in a very rural part of [the] UK – Cumbria. There are lots of isolated properties that are not linked to the sewerage network, so rely on septic tanks. These have to be emptied from time to time. I saw one such tanker going about its business. The slogan on the side said ‘Yesterday’s meals on wheels’. Nothing more to add…”

Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founded the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Earlier, he worked on unusual ways to use computers. His website is improbable.com.

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