118 HARNESSING THE EARTHWORM 



Rapidity of Increase 



Under favorable conditions, which means abundant food 

 and moisture, with temperatures ranging from fifty to seventy 

 or eighty degrees in the shade, earthworms increase with almost 

 incredible rapidity. Mature worms will produce an egg-capsule 

 every seven to ten days. The capsules will incubate and hatch 

 in fourteen to twenty-one days, each egg-capsule producing from 

 one to as high as twenty tiny worms. The newly hatched worms 

 develop rapidly and in sixty to ninety days will begin to pro- 

 duce capsules. We give here a brief summary of two reports, 

 received by the author, which will indicate what can be accom- 

 plished from a small beginning. In our own experiments we 

 have verified these results many times. 



Report No. 1 : From Son Bernardino, California. An earth- 

 worm culturist wrote that he started a lug-box culture on July 



23, 1939, with one hundred earthworm egg-capsules. The per- 

 tinent part of this man's letter follows : "On September 24, just 

 two months after I first 'planted' the capsules, I dumped the 

 contents of the lug on the sorting table. After carefully sorting 

 over approximately two-thirds of the lug's contents, I had har- 

 vested eight hundred egg-capsules and approximately three 

 hundred earthworms. I obtained another lug box, prepared new 

 compost of the same composition as previously described, and 

 divided my crop into the two lugs. The approximate one-third 

 balance of the unsorted original compost was buried under some 

 ferns in front of my house. Judging from the number of egg- 

 capsules I recovered, eight hundred by actual count, from ap- 

 proximately two-thirds of the original compost, I believe it is 

 conservative to estimate that there were at least one thousand 

 egg-capsules in the entire contents of the original lug. It is 

 my plan to take another census of these two lugs on November 



24, .and following that count I will inform you of my find- 

 ings . . . ROY S. M." 



