Effects of cast properties and passage through the earthworm gut on seed germination and seedling growth

Clause, Julia; Forey, Estelle

doi:10.1016/j.apsoil.2015.07.007

“…Earthworms ingest seeds from the total available seed pool, destroying some through digestion and egesting others back into the soil below ground or at the soil surface after a relatively short gut transit, e.g., 8 h for Dew Worm/Common Nightcrawler (Lumbricus ter restris; Hartenstein and Amico 1983), a non-native species in Canada (Addison 2009). Many egested seeds remain viable and may be transported through the soil vertically (Willems and Huijsmans 1994;Zaller and Saxler 2007;Regnier et al 2008) or horizontally (McTavish and Murphy 2021) and may experience increased or reduced germination (Ayanlaja et al 2001;Clause et al 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Lepitzki¹

2023

Can Field Nat

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Promoting the study and conservation of northern biodiversity since 1880The Ottawa Field-Naturalists ' Club Founded 1863 (Current Incorporation 1879 The objectives of this Club shall be to promote the appreciation, preservation, and conservation of Canada's natural heritage; to encourage investigation and publish the results of research in all fields of natural history and to diffuse information on these fields as widely as possible; to support and cooperate with organizations engaged in preserving, maintaining, or restoring environments of high quality for living things.

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“…Earthworms ingest seeds from the total available seed pool, destroying some through digestion and egesting others back into the soil below ground or at the soil surface after a relatively short gut transit, e.g., 8 h for Dew Worm/Common Nightcrawler (Lumbricus ter restris; Hartenstein and Amico 1983), a non-native species in Canada (Addison 2009). Many egested seeds remain viable and may be transported through the soil vertically (Willems and Huijsmans 1994;Zaller and Saxler 2007;Regnier et al 2008) or horizontally (McTavish and Murphy 2021) and may experience increased or reduced germination (Ayanlaja et al 2001;Clause et al 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying seeds egested by field-collected earthworms: a dynamic and overlooked pool in forest soil seed banks

McTavish

¹

,

Rossi²,

Bourchier³

et al. 2023

Can Field Nat

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Although awareness of the influence of earthworms on soil seed banks in Canadian forests is growing, there have been few direct field measurements. We used a novel pairing of field-collected earthworms from a central Great Lakes forest in Ontario with a laboratory seed egestion assay to obtain a snapshot of the number of seeds passing through earthworms compared with seeds found in the surrounding soil. We identified a pool of seeds egested by earthworms that accounted for 2.4% of all seeds found in the earthworms and the top 0–10 cm of soil. Individual earthworms contained 0–5 seeds. The large-bodied adult anecic non-native Dew Worm or Common Nightcrawler (Lumbricus terrestris) egested a disproportionate number of seeds for its abundance (50% of egested seeds from 17% of earthworms), but smaller earthworms were also an important source of egested seeds (the other 50%). This small-scale proof-of-concept study demonstrates a method of directly measuring earthworm–seed interactions in the field. It can also detect seeds egested by earthworms below ground that would otherwise be missed by other seed accounting methods and it highlights the importance of granivory by non-surface casting earthworms.

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