Gary Revell admiring the results of a day of worm grunting
Posted on 06/28/2009 6:48:26 AM PDT by JoeProBono
Worms usually come out when it rains, but this man knows another way to get them out of the ground.
Gary Revell is worm grunting - an unusual method that helps him catch worms.
He pounds a wooden stake, called a stob, into the ground and levels his 10-pound flat iron over the top.
Then he slowly, rhythmically, rubs the iron over the stob, back and forth.
He's making the ground vibrate, and after a short while, earthworms start to climb out of the soil.
Gary Revell, Worm Grunter: "There's an art to it, you know. I've tried to teach people how to do it, you know, and they just give up. They say they just don't understand how we can get these worms out of the ground with this stuff."
He and his colleagues are up before sunrise every day, working deep near the Apalachicola Forest by the Gulf of Mexico in north Florida, in Tate's Hell State Forest.
It's a well-earned name because its swarming with hungry mosquitoes, pestering gnats and poisonous snakes.
The vibrations bring out the worms, slithering everywhere on the forest floor.
Gary Revell admiring the results of a day of worm grunting
I’ve seen it done by letting a chainsaw sit on the ground and idle.
i used to do this as a kid. except i’d find a small sapling, maybe 1-2” in diameter, and cut it off about waist level and begin slowly sawing down the middle with a hand saw. the worms would come right up out of the ground.
I wonder if having sex outside on the grass would get the same results? ; )
“Worm grunting involves going into the forest, driving a wooden stake into the ground and then rubbing the top of the stake with a long piece of steel called a rooping iron. This makes a peculiar grunting sound that drives nearby earthworms to the surface where they can be easily collected for fish bait.
Despite a lot of speculation, worm grunters don’t really know why the technique works. But Catania, an associate professor of biological sciences at Vanderbilt who studies moles, thought that the explanation might lie in Darwin’s remark: “It is often said that if the ground is beaten or otherwise made to tremble worms will believe that they are pursued by a mole and leave their burrows.” So this spring he traveled down to Florida and performed a number of experiments to test this hypothesis with the cooperation of veteran worm grunters Gary and Audrey Revell. His conclusion, that the humans are driving the worms to the surface by unknowingly mimicking the sound of digging moles, is reported in the Oct. 14 issue of the Public Library of Science.
“This is a fascinating biology story and a fascinating sociology story,” says Catania, who received the MacArthur genius award in 2006. “The biology story is the question of why the worms behave as they do and the sociology story is the fact that hundreds of people once made their livelihood by collecting worms in this unique fashion.”
Actually, the technique is practiced in a number of parts of the southeastern United States, under various names including worm fiddling, snoring and charming, but it reached its apex in the 1960’s in Apalachicola when thousands of people grunted for worms until the U.S. Forest Service began permitting the previously unregulated practice out of concern for the impact the industry was having on the native worm population. Now far fewer people practice this technique. The Revells are two of the few that still make much of their living from worm grunting.”
Oh those look lovely... LOL...
We’ve got a bunch of weenie dogs that just love to dig and get those those huge nightcrawlers. When we’re out digging around in the garden and there’s one of those nightcrawlers, all we’ve got to say is “Worm!” and those dogs come a running and they start chewing it up... :-)
They’re absolutely crazy and nuts over those nightcrawlers...
Have they “outlawed” grunting at Wimbleton?
Ask your wife.......
:-O
She doesn’t like worms. ; )
Thanks for making my day. I needed a laugh.
Took my mind of the other stuff for a moment.
I can't teach her anything . . .
When I was a kid, nightcrawlers would come up out of the ground when we were jumproping on the grass.
File this under “Guy with too much time on his hands”
Did he try several thousand other forms of his “art” before coming up with this superfluous information?
My grandfather always said that dogs ran around in a circle because they couldn’t catch their rear ends... LOL...
Maybe they were just chasing that little character... :-)
...if you vibrate, I suppose it would.
I don’t think that you can vibrate that fast.
If you can, I want to see it on You Tube!
Cheers!
Stob. Haven't heard that word since my grandparents passed away. "Whang that stob with yer mattock." Funniest sounding colloquial phrase I'd ever heard at the time. Quite the old southernism, and an Appalachian one at that, or so I thought. This guy's in Florida.
Sent me back, though. Loved those people dearly, been gone twenty-five years. Thanks for posting this thread, if only for that reason.
Stob, lol. Seems like another world.
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