No matter how strange it may sound, this time the focus of attention was on the banal inhabitants of the soil...An environmental disaster has overtaken France, or rather its agricultural part. Earthworms, without which it is impossible to imagine agriculture, have become a question of extinction. What could be a threat to earthworms? Chemicals or herbicides immediately come to mind, but no... Everything is much more banal: the death of earthworms is brought about by their relatives, also worms but only larger ones and not averse to dining on their own kind.
Jean-Loup Justine, a biologist and professor at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, came across a photo of a worm with a shovel-shaped head from an amateur naturalist. For France, such types of invertebrates are completely uncharacteristic, so the professor decided to first check whether the naturalist was playing a prank on him. And together with his colleagues he turned to the population of France with a request to tell them whether they had come across such worms. The answers were not long in coming: the French had noticed such invertebrates since the 1990s, but did not know that they were unusual.
In total, scientists have received more than a hundred pieces of evidence. Several worms were caught alive and sent back - including a specimen of Bipalium kewense, which grows to more than half a meter.
Bipalium are predators; they hunt earthworms, snails, slugs, and insects using a toxin. Previously, Ireland and Scotland experienced their invasion - in the affected areas, yields fell by 6%. Why invertebrates were not noticed in France for so long, they cannot yet explain, nor can they calculate the damage already caused.
Based on PeerJ Author: GEximius
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