Worm challenge update 1

The bedding has compacted

Its the end of the first week of the worm challenge, so I couldnt help myself that opening the container, spread things around and look for the worms to see if they survived there first few days.

 And the answer is : (drum roll) 

Yes! I could find easily the on that was already bigger, and I think it looks bigger now, but I dont think it has become fully mature - but it will be soon, it seems that the clitellum is appearing.  The other one is still smaller.

The black particle you see are not worm castings - it is the used coffee grounds I added while setting up.

Some one asked on google plus how I would be managing the "gene pool" as a population developing from 2worms will obviously be heavily inbred. My first answer was that I would return these worms to the "General population" at some point. But I might be interesting to remove a juvenile every once in a while and replace by one coming from my worm crate. Another interesting thing could be to keep them totally isolated and see if the population collapses at some point... In which case, given that most hobby vermi composters start with half a pound or a pound of worms - which is a limited population too - and coming from a worm farm that may have also started from a relatively small population-  that would mean that exchanging worms between vermicomposters may be a necessity to avoid "genetic driven" collapse. Thaugh the genetic diversity between ~ 200 worms may be enough to avoid inbreeding.

I think I might give an update every other week for the future - unless next time I check both worms have clitellums - in which case that will be the real "start " of the experiment.

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