We received a rather bizarre question (actually, it was more like a statement) from a reader recently about a pink, white, and red worm she found. (Perhaps we should write pinkish, whitish, and reddish worm, as the worm isn’t really any of these colors precisely.) The subject of the “question” isn’t very bizarre – it clearly centers on a white, red, and pink worm – but its execution is. The reader’s message, written in all capital letters for no apparent reason, asks no question, but it does describe a worm found in a garden, and it ends with the statement “I am curious,” which is written in a larger font. Because of the message’s considerable ambiguity, we’ll have to just assume that the reader simply wanted to know what the worm is. What is the white, red, and pink worm our reader found in the garden?

We’ll begin, as is our custom, with the pictures our reader sent:

It’s a little hard to make out the creature in the pictures. We tried zooming in on both of them to find distinct characteristics, but the resolution of both pictures isn’t very good. As such, we can only provide an educated guess as to what our reader found, and our educated guess in this case is about as unextraordinary as it gets: we think our reader found an earthworm.

The reader herself actually admits as much, but she was confused by its color. However, we don’t think there is anything particularly strange about the worm’s color, and in any case its color seems to consistent with that of an earthworm. The stereotypical earthworm (if such a concept exists) is perhaps entirely brown, but a close examination of many earthworms will reveal that they are in fact a reddish, pinkish, and whitish color. (Search for “earthworm” and you’ll find literally millions of images that demonstrate this, or you could just find an earthworm and check it out.) Earthworms are also annelids, which means they have segmented bodies, and it’s fairly clear (at least in the second picture) that the creature our reader found has a segmented body. Moreover, the worm was found in the soil of our reader’s garden, which is of course exactly where you would expect to find an earthworm. Earthworms are susceptible to drying out, so they primarily live in moist soil. Where can you reliably find moist soil? In a garden, of course. And finally, as you can see from the ruler in the reader’s pictures, the worm she found is about eight centimeters (about three inches) long, which is consistent with the size of an earthworm.

One thing we looked closely for in the pictures our reader sent was a clitellum, which is the bump or thickened body segment found on earthworms that is used for reproduction. We were not able to determine if the creature pictured above actually has a clitellum, but we also couldn’t conclude that it doesn’t have one. (And even if a clitellum wasn’t visible, this wouldn’t prove that it isn’t an earthworm; when a clitellum isn’t visible, this only means that the earthworm isn’t sexually mature.)

Again, we definitely aren’t sure that our reader found an earthworm, but there is a fairly good chance she did, not only because the creature she found shares characteristics with earthworms, but also because earthworms are extremely common. Obviously, it is more likely that she found a common creature than an uncommon one, all other things being equal.

• 
•