Meter-Long Monsters That Smell Like Lilies

Feb. 15, 2006 — -- As soon as she saw the white flash, Yaniria Sanchez-de Leon knew her shovel had turned up an important discovery. Although others had searched for decades, Sanchez-de Leon had succeeded where they had failed.

She had found a giant Palouse earthworm.

Or to be more precise, she had found part of a giant Palouse earthworm. It took another shovelful of dirt to turn up the rest of the glistening white worm, which she had accidentally cut in two with her blade.

Back at the University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho, where she is a doctoral candidate in soil science, word got around that Sanchez-de Leon had found what many experts were beginning to think had grown extinct.

That would be a pity, because Driloleirus americanus is no ordinary earthworm.

For starters, it's white. And it reportedly smells like a lily. Unlike nearly all the other earthworms in North America, it is believed to be a native.

And it can get big. Really big.

Early reports claim the worm can get up to three feet long. That would make it huge by American standards, but considerably smaller than the 10-foot-long worms that have been found in Australia.

But alas, Sanchez-de Leon's worm is a little guy, or gal, since earthworms are both. It's just six inches long. That would suggest it is a youngster, and thus the species is still reproducing, but no one so far has been able to put an age on it.

But there's no question about what it is.

"It's very different from other earthworms in terms of size and characteristics," Sanchez-de Leon said. "It hasn't been found in so long that I'm glad to see that it's still around."

She found the worm while digging holes in Washington as part of her doctoral dissertation on earthworms. She was working in a vast region of fertile soil that sprawls over about 2 million acres of north-central Idaho and southeastern Washington. Known locally as "the Palouse," it comprises some of the most productive farmland in the country.

And because of that, earthworms are king.