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Field Study: Worms Leave 'Til No-Till 无犁也来把田耕

Charles Darwin is, most famously, the author of The Origin of Species. But the last book he ever wrote gets far less attention today. It's called The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms. And earthworms were a passion: he wrote about their habits, their soil-tilling abilities, and even kept pots of worm-filled soil in his study.

查尔斯·达尔文是著名书籍《物种起源》的作者。然而，他写的最后一本书在当今却不那么引人注意。这本书名为《腐殖土的形成和蚯蚓的作用》。蚯蚓于他是一种激情：他在书中描述它们的习性、它们的耕作能力、甚至还在研究中培育了许多盆满是蚯蚓的泥土。

But his fascination¹ was met with ridicule² by some. "There's a famous cartoon where Darwin as an old man is in the middle. He evolves from monkeys and the monkeys evolved from earthworms."

但他对此的痴迷却遭到了一些人的嘲笑。“有一幅著名的漫画，漫画中达尔文被描绘成一个老人。他从猴子进化而来，而猴子则是从蚯蚓进化而来的。”

Olaf Schmidt is a soil ecologist at University College Dublin. And not among those who would criticize Darwin for his interests. "I love earthworms, earthworms are brilliant. They're our friends, they're really important."

奥拉夫·施密特是都柏林大学的一名土壤生态学家。他没有因达尔文对蚯蚓的兴趣而批判他。“我喜欢蚯蚓，蚯蚓很聪明。它们是我们的朋友，而且它们真的很重要。”

One particularly interesting group of worms, he says, are the so-called "anecic" worms: the deep soil dwellers³. "They live all their life in a single vertical⁴ channel in the soil. And at night they surface," looking for food—manure, straw, stuff like that, "and they pull it into their channels."

他说，有一种被称为“anecic”的蚯蚓特别有趣：它们居住在深层土壤中。“它们一生都生活在土壤中的一个垂直的通道里。到了晚上，它们才会出来，”寻找稻草之类的肥料食用，“它们还会把食物拉到自己居住的通道里。”

They're big boys. Which makes them especially vulnerable to the plow⁵. "Because they're so big, so they're chopped, exposed to birds, and their channels are destroyed."

它们个头都比较大。这使得它们特别容易被耕地的犁伤到。“因为它们太大了，所以会被砍被斩，并暴露给以它们为食的鸟类，它们居住的通道也会被毁。”

Schmidt and his colleague Maria Briones analyzed⁶ the relationship between tilling and the health of a dozen species of earthworms. They looked at 65 years'-worth of farm field studies, spanning the globe.

施密特和他的同事玛利亚·布里奥尼斯(Maria Briones)分析了耕作与十多种蚯蚓的健康之间的关系。他们研究了全球范围内耕作价值可达65年的耕地。

And they found that in heavily plowed⁷ fields, half the earthworms had disappeared. But when farmers switched to no-till or conservation agriculture, worm populations wriggled⁸ back to normal numbers after about a decade. The study is in the journal Global Change Biology.

他们发现在耕作量大的土地中，一半蚯蚓都消失了。但是当农民们转向实行免耕或保护性农业时，约十年后蚯蚓的数量就会回到正常数量。这项研究发表于《全球变化生物学》杂志。

"The plow," Darwin wrote, "is one of the most ancient and most valuable of man's inventions; but long before he existed the land was in fact regularly plowed, and still continues to be thus plowed by earthworms." And, Schmidt says, just as the worms look after the soil, the flip⁹ side's true, too. "If you look after the soil, you also look after the earthworms. So it is a good-news story."

“犁，”达尔文写道，“是人类最古老且最有价值的发明之一。但是，在它还未存在之前，土地就已经被蚯蚓定期地耕作了，而且这种耕作还会继续下去。”施密特说，就像蚯蚓照料土壤一样，反之亦然。“如果你照料了土壤，那你同时也照料了蚯蚓。所以这是件双面利好的事。”