Lucy Carter

 Friday 26^th June: Bioblitz day. The Bioblitz was at Ashton Court estate in Bristol, organised by Bristol Natural History Consortium. A Bioblitz is an event where loads of specialists, amateur naturalists and the public all get together in one place to survey all the plants, animals and fungi they can find in 24 hours. We of course were the earthworm contingent.  We found five different species of worm to add to their list - a list that reached a whopping 569 species by the end of the 24 hour period! The NHM’s worm expert David Jones came with us to help run the OPAL Soil and Earthworm survey –  you can see a video of him at the event by going to the OPAL YouTube channel www.youtube.com/opalexplorenature. The NHM OPAL team are planning our own Bioblitz with a seashore theme in Devon this August. More details to come soon so watch this space…

 

Saturday 27^th June: the World Worm Charming Championships! Sarah’s already blogged about this so I wont write too much but I wanted to include this video because the sound is just great – lots of people clanging poles against gardening forks and all sorts of other noisy ways to make vibrations to encourage the worms to come up!

 

 

 

144 teams competed in the championships, spending 30 minutes ‘charming’ worms out of a 3x3m plot by any means (but no chemicals or water allowed!). As Sarah said, we got a measly 6 worms compared to the winners who got 567 (wow!) but that does still technically leave us something like 140^th in the world!! Find out more about worm charming here… www.wormcharming.com.