Nasir Guyton November 13, 2008
Bass School Room107-8th

The Effect of Soil Type on Earthworm
Population
Earthworms are invertebrates, which mean they don’t have backbones. Their soft bodies can be all sorts of colors: such as brown, pink, and red. Earthworms have a brain, five hearts, and parts inside their bodies, which help them to breathe. The smallest earthworms are about 1 centimeter long and the largest can be 4 meters long. One of the largest earthworms is the Giant Gippsland Earthworm, which is found in one part of Australia.
Earthworm’s hermaphrodite means that each earthworm has male parts that produce sperm and female parts that produce eggs. When two earthworms mate, they lie together, and cover themselves in sticky mucus, and pass sperm into each others body.
Earthworms dig large burrows which let water and air into the soil. It helps stop the erosion and lets the water and air gets down to the roots of plants. The burrows also help plant roots to move easily through the soil and into new spaces.
One important thing that an earthworm does is it plows the soil by tunneling through it. The secret to earthworm travel lies in two things you can’t see by just looking. Their complex system of muscles enables them to not only wiggle like crazy but also to very quickly alternate between being stubby and thick, and long slender, which usually are held inside their bodies. When the worms want to stay in their burrows, they jab their setae into the surrounding dirt, which anchors them in place. Top soil is the upper, outer most layer of soil. Its top is usually 2 to 8 inches. It has the highest concentration of organic matter.
Miracle-Grow is a brand of plant food and soil product. It is commonly used in gardens and household plants and sold by major retailers. The original Miracle- Grow was developed by Horace Hagedorn and Otto Stern in the late 1940’s. Regular soil is packed with all kinds of microbes, which is one of the most important elements that there are to growing healthy plants and vegetables. Dirt contains all kinds of minerals and nutrients. Regular soils are composed of earth minerals combined with decayed or decaying organic material such as leaves, dead plants or critters.