[Gasification] Forest Duff & Earthworms - Off Topic ?

Thu Oct 2 01:18:02 CDT 2014

Dear David,
the environment inside the guts of all animals is anaerobic and
therefore all animals (including human beings) are living biogas
plants. In India, cattle dung is added as a rule to the compost pit in
which earthworms are used for making compost. In fact, it is
considered to be essential. Cattle dung is a well known source of
methanogens and it is regularly used as inoculum when one starts a
newly installed biogas plant. There is no doubt that the earthworms
feed on the bacteria in the soil, but the digestive juices of the
earthworms are mixed with the ingested soil so that the bacteria in
the soil are digested. The soil bacteria are mostly aerobic. The
bacteria in the guts of animals (including earthworms) are either
facultative anaerobes or exclusively anaerobic (like the methanogens).
One must assume that the bacteria in the guts of earthworms get mixed
with the ingested soil. Being living beings they need oxygen for their
metabolism, which they cannot take from the air because of the
anaerobic conditions inside the gut. Therefore they take oxygen from
their substrate. That is why the methanogens convert carbohydrates
into a hydrocarbon (methane), trivalent iron into divalent iron,
sulphate into sulphides and nitrates into ammonia. Because it was
reported to me that the casts of earthworms had unusually high iron
content, and because it is not possible for the worms to make iron out
of non-ferrous material, I just offered an explanation, which was
based on my knowledge of biogas technology. Incidentally, converting
trivalent iron into divalent iron is good for the plants, because
plants can take up iron only in the divalent form.I once again
emphasize here that I am not an expert of earthworms, but I do claim
to be a biologist.   I definitely remember having read that methane is
continuosly generated by soils in a forest. If I find the relevant
paper, I shall send the reference to the list.
Yours
A.D.Karve

On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 10:49 AM, David Murphy <djfmurphy at dodo.com.au> wrote:
> Gentlemen, I've seen these posts about earthworms and finally feel the need
> to comment.
>
> I thought the last person to publish material prejudicial to earthworms was
> Ewald Wolny (1846-1901) but he was shown to be wrong by Charles Darwin.
> Wolny was man enough to acknowledge his errors and I have always applauded
> him for this.
>
> But then, over 120 years later, the state of Minnesota takes up the cudgels
> !   The original post about the attitude of Minnesota to Amynthas agrestis
> simply displayed the fact that because a person may be well qualified in one
> discipline, it doesn't mean he's qualified in another.    Here I refer to
> the person who drafted the Minnesota paper on "Crazy worms" and how damaging
> to soils they were.   What nonsense !  One of the world's greatest
> authorities on earthworms (and there are few of these) is Prof Clive Edwards
> and last I heard he was at Ohio State Uni, head of the Entimology Dept.   A
> phone call from Minnesota would have saved them from publishing such
> rubbish.   "Invasive earthworms" indeed !   J.M Stockdill of the New Zealand
> Dept. of Primary Industry demonstrated that by transplanting (invasive)
> earthworms into pasture, that productivity of that pasture was permanently
> raised by 25% with  no other action taken.   Then, Anand Karve joins in !
> I've heard of earthworms being  called Bioreactors, but never biogas plants.
> Bioreators was a name conferred on them by Dr. Uday Bhawalkar of the
> Bhawalkar Earthworm Reasearch Institute, Pune, India.   Most of the matter
> taken in by earthwoms in their search for food, passes through their gut
> unchanged and this is particularly so for metals.  The preferred food for
> worms (both compost and earth) is bacteria, with yeasts and asssociated soil
> life second.    In seeking the bacteria, worms are forced to take in parent
> food to which the bacteria have attached themselves.     J.N.Parle (circa
> 1939) found that some worms could absorb metals up to a particular level and
> then the accumulation ceased.      However, no chemical or physical reaction
> takes place in any metals passing through the worm's gut and gas being
> produced by earthworms is unknown.    Castings produced are aerobic on the
> outside but the inside anaerobic.   The anaerobic portion would indeed
> produce some gas but to my knowledge this has not been measured.
>
> Some products such as antibiotics were once credited to worms but this was
> found to be not so, and it was the bacteria fostered in the gut which was
> responsible for the antibiotics.    It's an interesting symbiosis, that
> while worms create an environment in their gut in which bacteria thrive, the
> host worm also consumes bacteria as food.
>
> This, and a whole lot of other stuff, is all in my latest book on the topic,
> Organic Growing with Worms.
>
> David Murphy
>
>
> On 01/10/2014 1:37 PM, Anand Karve wrote:
>
> Dear Mark,
> I am not an earthworm specialist. I started thinking about earthworms
> only when it was reported that the casts of earthworms had an
> unusually high iron content. It was then I realised that the guts of
> earthworms acted as miniature biogas plants. I would therefore assume
> that the microbes in the guts of earthworms converted nitrates into
> ammonia, sulphates into H2S, and cellulose (i.e. carbohydrates) into
> methane. There might  be other chemicals formed by reducing oxidised
> minerals i (e.g. silicates) nto their reduced forms, but I am ignorant
> of them.
> Yours
> A.D.Karve
> On Tue, Sep 30, 2014 at 11:23 PM, Mark Elliott Ludlow <mark at ludlow.com>
> wrote:
>
> Dr. Karve,
> Do you have a list of those positive effects attributable to earth worms,
> particularly those in the biochemical transformational mode?
> Thanks, kindly,
> Best, Mark
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gasification [mailto:gasification-bounces at lists.bioenergylists.org] On
> Behalf Of Anand Karve
> Sent: Monday, September 29, 2014 9:58 PM
> To: Discussion of biomass pyrolysis and gasification
> Subject: Re: [Gasification] Forest Duff & Earthworms - Off Topic ?
> Dear Jeff,
> one of the points that is missed in most discussions on earthworms is the
> fact that earthworms are miniature biogas plants. Ms Hemangi Jambhekar, a
> lady selling earthworm compost as a business, told me that earthworm casts
> had unusually high iron content. The soil in our area is rich in iron, but
> the iron, being Fe2O3(ferric oxide) is not soluble in water and therefore
> soil analysis shows our soils to be poor in iron. When this soil passes
> through the gut of an earthworm, the anaerobic micro-organisms in the gut
> take a part of the oxygen from the Fe2O3  for their own metabolism and
> convert the Fe2O3 into FeO(ferrous oxide), which is water soluble.
> Similarly, the casts of worms contain many other organic and inorganic
> components of the soil in their reduced form. The reduced compounds serve
> the soil microbes as food, because they can oxidise them to obtain energy
> for their own metabolism. This causes an increase in the population density
> of soil microbes. It is a universally accepted fact that the population
> density of soil microbes is positively correlated to soil fertility.
> Yours
> A.D.Karve
> On Sun, Sep 28, 2014 at 10:29 PM, Jeff Davis <jeffdavis0124 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> Kind of off topic:
> Aren't earthworms good for soil and gardens?
> It depends. Earthworms create a soil of a certain consistency. For
> soils that are compacted due to heavy use by agriculture and
> urbanization, for example, earthworm tunnels can create "macro-pores"
> to aid the movement of water through the soil. They also help
> incorporate organic matter into the mineral soil to make more
> nutrients available to plants. However, in agricultural settings
> earthworms can also have harmful effects. For instance, their castings
> (worm excrement) can increase erosion along irrigation ditches. In the
> urban setting, earthworm burrows can cause lumpy lawns.
> Relative to simplified ecosystems such as agricultural and
> urban/suburban soils, earthworm-free hardwood forests in Minnesota
> have a naturally loose soil with a thick duff layer. Most of our
> native hardwood forest tree seedlings, wildflowers, and ferns grow
> best in these conditions. However, when earthworms invade they
> actually increase the compaction of hardwood forest soils. Compaction
> decreases water infiltration. Less infiltration combined with the
> removal of the duff and fallen tree leaves results in increased surface
>
> runoff and erosion.
>
> <http://www.dnr.state.mn.us/invasives/terrestrialanimals/earthworms/in
> dex.html>
> Jeff
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Dr. A.D. Karve
Trustee & Founder President, Appropriate Rural Technology Institute (ARTI)