A reader wrote to us recently to report that he saw a huge earthworm (in his words, a “HUGE earthworm”) high in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of eastern California. The large earthworm came out after a light rain and made its way under the tent our reader was sleeping in. He was wondering if it was native to this region of the California, or if it was “someone’s escaped fish bait” (lots of people fish for trout in this region), and he wanted to know if we could identify the exact species of earthworm he found. What might this enormous earthworm be?

A little while back, we received one of the coolest worm photos we’ve ever been sent. It features a large worm that a reader found in Rwanda, Africa. When we say “large worm,” we mean it. While by no means the largest worm we’ve ever heard about (some worms are quite big), it is certainly sizable, appearing to be at least a foot (30 centimeters) or so long. The reader’s guide in Africa said that these worms are “like candy” to gorillas, which we thought was very interesting, although unfortunately not helpful for worm identification purposes (as far as we know). And of course this is what our reader wanted us to do: identify the huge worm she found, which appears to be an earthworm, which can indeed be huge.