52. Red Earthworm or "Red Wriggler"

Lumbricus rubellus

It is hard to imagine what the landscape was like more than 400 years ago before the earthworm was introduced to North America. The first English colony of Jamestown, Virginia is assumed to be where Lumbricus terrestris and L. rubellus first crawled. When the ships were coming to load up with tobacco from the new world, they would unload the cargo load of dirt and rocks that were in as ballast and these loads undoubtedly had both common species of worms. The change that the earthworms have wrought to the land is huge; where there was litter that provides food for the plants and hold in moisture, the worms would eat it all. The only native Canadian earthworms are found in glacial refugia such as the Brook's Peninsula and Haida Gwaii, or as our friend Joanne Lawrence discovered, the top of some of the mountains on Vancouver Island - her discovery was named Bimastos lawrenceae.

 Here is a link to a key to the earthworms of Canada:  https://www.naturewatch.ca/english/wormwatch/