Harry Potter would only be too happy if one fine morning the ‘magical’ Giant Palouse Earthworm crawled out of his goblet of miracles

J K Rowling, here's food for thought. Would you be interested in a three feet long pinkish worm that smells like lilies and spits? It was long thought to be extinct, this worm. But in true Hogwart style, it’s popping out intermittently from tiny swatches of farmlands in the Washington-Idaho border. And it’s making waves in the region.

If conservationists had their way, they would hardsell the Giant Palouse Earthworm to Rowling and insist she gave it pride of place in Harry Potter’s armament of miracles.

“This worm is the stuff that legends and fairy tales are made of,” says worm supporter Steve Paulson. “What kid wouldn’t want to play with a 3 foot-long, lily smelling, soft pink worm that spits on attackers?”

The region’s media is excitedly reporting sightings of Driloleirus americanus, native to the deep soils of the Palouse, which were built up by millions of years of volcanic ash and are some of the richest farmland on Earth. Little is known about the giant worms: how many there are, where they live, how they behave, or why they are so scarce.

he worm was first found in 1897, and the species has always been elusive. It can burrow down to 15 feet deep. There have been only three reported sightings since 1987.
The most recent sighting was was on May 27, 2005, when a graduate student from the University of Idaho unearthed one specimen. The Giant Palouse Earthworm is the largest and longest-lived earthworm on the American continent.

But why the sudden interest? Locals are frantically trying to salvage the last remnants of the undeveloped Palouse prairie, and the earthworm could play a major role in that. “Listing the Giant Palouse Earthworm may be the only way to protect the Palouse Prairie,” said O Lynne Nelson, who signed a petition last week seeking protection for the worm under the Endangered Species Act.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will decide if this needs more study and begin a year-long review thereafter to decide if endangered species protection is required for the Giant Palouse Earthworm.

Researchers are saying the Palouse sub-basin wouldn’t be complete unless the Palouse giant earthworm was mentioned. When Frank Smith first unearthed this giant earthworm near Pullman in 1897, he named it Megascolides americanus, thinking that it was closely related to Australia’s fifteen-foot worms (Megascolides australis). Although dwarfed by its Australian counterpart, the three-foot long Palouse is certainly a giant among worms. This species, really only distantly related to Megascolides, was renamed Driloleirus which means “lily-like worm,” reflecting the flowery aroma that it emits when handled

Since its initial discovery, very few other sightings of this species have been documented. The giant Palouse earthworms live in the deep, rich soils of the Palouse bunchgrass prairies. Thick layers of organic matter that have accumulated in the soils of the Palouse for hundreds of years sustain the giants during the wetter seasons. During summer droughts, the worms dig burrows as deep as fifteen feet, conserving water with specialised kidney-like organs.

Farmers that arrived in eastern Washington prized the fertile Palouse soils, resulting in the almost complete destruction of the bunchgrass prairies that characterised this region by the late 1800s. The biggest threat to these elusive giants continues to be habitat destruction due to agriculture and development, but the introduction of the now widespread European earthworm has also helped to further the decline of the native Palouse worm.