The Essentials – A Survival Story

Last April I walked across the parking lot into work after a long spring nights soaking and was greeted by thousands and thousands of worms.  I couldn’t help but walk in a little slower that morning as I pondered the worms paristalticly parading across the pavement.  

This is what I remember observing and thinking that day.

As I walked from my car to the front door at work one rainy April morning I noticed 100s if not thousands of worms sprawled across the expanse of the parking lot.  There were small worms and big worms, and all were completely stretched out, presumably in an attempt to not drown in the supersaturated earth.  My first thought was that if a guy wanted to collect worms this would be a great time to do it.  This in fact is a favorite childhood past time for many people. I remember a lot of good times collecting worms on a rainy day or soaking an area of the lawn to collect worms before going fishing. As useful as this phenomenon is for would be fisher kids, to a worm this is a survival mechanism.

 I don’t know enough about the biology of worms at this moment to comment very specifically but I am aware that worms have a nervous system and a capacity for some sensory responses but they are not on level with mammals or fish or other higher organisms in terms of intelligence, decision making or anything like that.  What worms do have is a survival instinct.  They have an instinct that triggers a response if they are in danger of suffocating because the ground is filling with water just as people have a survival instinct of getting out of water if we are being held under water and couldn’t breathe. Our instinct, like the worm’s, is to get out.  Worms don’t have the capacity to want. Worms have an instinct (or nature or biochemistry or whatever you want to call it) to get out in order to survive.

As a result of this instinct, as I was walking into work that rainy April morning, there were thousands of worms within 100 feet of me that were surviving the rain. They were surviving this horrible situation, making an attempt to avoid drowning in the murky soil below. Their home had become inhospitable and as a result they fled.

Fast Forward through 8 ½ hours of work,  five delicious cups of coffee, three pieces of peanut butter toast, a bowl of delicious lasagna supplemented with hard boiled eggs and tobacco sauce, I emerged from work having survived it (having satiated my instincts for survival by eating all of that food of course).  I emerged to find, not all of the worms, but many of the worms, as worm carcasses, splayed out across the blacktop. Dead.  These worms were not survivors. They followed an instinct to get out of a situation that would have surely caused their death but their response also caused their death.

Not all fleeing worms however, remained to die on the blacktop. Some of the worms went back to the soil, some of the worms found higher ground or found a moist place that would not consume them and fill their little membranes with the aqueous poison that would subsequently claim their fallen comrades. In short, they survived. This is the battle worms fight every time there is a rain, every time their home becomes inhospitable to life. They have to survive it.

Those worms that return and continue burrowing through the ground once it dries out a bit and especially those worms that procreate (that is go have little worm babies) with other worms, those worms survived.  Not just as individuals and not just in terms of their family name or to live another day.  Their specific genetic makeup survived the flood and those genes became more likely to be passed on to the next generation of worms.

 Perhaps if there is something about the survivors genetic make up that caused them to have an affinity for higher ground or sensed a finer range of moisture levels that would be hospitable or if they just got lucky, their genes will go on and the genes of their mates on the blacktop will not.  

So some of the worms survived, some of them did not, some of the gene variations will be passed on, some will not. In this story, and in an evolutionary sense, genes are the ultimate survivors.

While this is quite a harrowing tale it is certainly not the picture of survival of the fittest that is painted by some authors regarding cruelty or violence between organisms.  There is certainly no direct conflict or fight between two individuals.  This is not the story of the lion tracking and stalking a gazelle to catch it and rip open its throat to subdue and eat it (though that is certainly also an example of something surviving and something not surviving and ultimately linked to the survival of genetic material).

The worms give us a survival story with evolutionary consequences but not the type of survival we always think of. This is characteristic of evolution in a lot of ways. To understand and accept evolution we have shift our paradigms toward those of greater and more minute scales than we often have the mental capacity to comprehend (I know it’s the case for me). 

How long is a billion years?  What is a gene? How is a gene expressed and what impact does that have on me? These are mind bending questions and questions that we ultimately have little to no frame of reference to answer unless we examine them intentionally and with tools that are useful for exploring them.