Attack of the Giant Earthworm!
Okay, okay, my headline is a tad sensational.
It's just a way to draw attention to the rediscovery of one of the Northwest's rarest species: Driloleirus americanus, better known, when it is known at all, as the giant Palouse earthworm. The earthworm, which may have once have reached 3 feet in length, was believed extinct until a 6-inch specimen was recently rediscovered by a grad student from Idaho.
The earthworm was found on a tiny 800-acre preserve, a remnant of an arid grassland that blanketed 2 million acres--an ecosystem now almost entirely converted to agriculture. For me, the earthworm's decades-long absence, is a reminder of how important bread-and-butter land conservation is. When we don't protect intact native landscapes, we rob the world--and ourselves--of the biological wealth we inherited. That's the sad story of the Columbia Basin pygmy rabbit, a species that went functionally extinct this month, largely because it lacked habitat.
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