In the southeastern United States, some make their living by gathering worms for fishing bait through 'worm grunting'. Worm grunters drive a wooden stake into the ground and then scrape it with a metal sheet; within minutes worms pop out of the ground and the grunters pick them up.
Two reports have recently been published on the phenomenon. Jayne Yack of Carleton University in Ontario, Canada, and her team found that the worms emerge in response to vibrations from the grunting — low-frequency pulsed vibrations at below 500 hertz that could be felt by researchers standing several metres away. They suggest that the vibrations mimic rain or the foraging of predators.
Kenneth Catania of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, compared the grunters' vibrations with those made by rain and worm-devouring moles, and studied their relative effects on worms. He puts his chips on the vibrations mimicking the movement of the moles, causing the worms to flee.
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Ecology: Grunter gathering. Nature 455, 1011 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/4551011b
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/4551011b
