[culi]

It actually can be a pretty huge deal. On their own it's not the biggest issue, but they can compound a lot of invasive plants. Most native flora evolved without earthworms. Earthworms are incredibly effective at breaking down matter into easily accessible nutrients for plants. Native plants aren't built to take advantage of this. You know which plants are though? Non-native invasive plants from the rest of the earthworm-having world

Earthworms are generally a very welcome addition to any soil ecology, but they're currently playing an extremely destructive role. A role that probably wouldn't be as problematic if it weren't for all the compounding effects of other invasive species

[rad_gruchalski]

> It actually can be a pretty huge deal.

I think this is a problem as old as the world. I was recently reading archives of the Jurassic News from roughly 165 million years ago, and I found a very interesting discussion between dinosaurs of that age. They were discussing how these new flying species, commonly referred to as birds, are a problem because they fly, move at vast distances and spread non-native plants by eating seeds and crapping them miles away.

[culi]

Yes I don't disagree, but I think it's the same as everything related to topics of climate change. For example, the global increase in temperature itself isn't what's bad. We've had temperatures this high before and it led to global rainforests. The bad part is how fast it's happening and all the confounding factors causing a runaway effect

Perhaps if done carefully we could eco-engineer earthworms back into north american soil ecologies. But it's not being done carefully