Every gardener has seen worms and larvae living alongside their plants. Unfortunately, most gardeners have also had to deal with the little critters eating those same plants. However, very few of us have seen worms that plant their own gardens. That is exactly what a research team headed by Zhenchang Zhu discovered when studying the ragworm (Hediste diversicolor). They described their findings in the December, 2016 article entitled Sprouting as a Gardening Strategy to Obtain Superior Supplementary Food: Evidence from a Seed-Caching Marine Worm that was published in the journal Ecology. Ragworms live in the ocean and have been previously admired for their effective food gathering methods. While remaining safe in their dens, ragworms spread webs made of mucus across the dens’ openings. Continue reading [...]…