Do Worms Fall Out of the Sky?

Had a great call at work today.

A woman says, after a recent rainfall, the parking lot and the driveway were covered with worms.  So many worms, they must have fallen from the sky and covered the ground.  Is that possible?

Well, ummm, in a word, no.

There is no (normal) mechanism to pull the worms up into the air.  Let alone drop them back to the surface.  Sure, a tornado can rip things out of the ground a drop them miles away… but that’s just not normal.

Think of it this way:  when a hurricane picks up moisture from the ocean, that moisture fuels the storm and falls later as rain.  The rain is not salt water.  It’s just plain water.  That’s because salt doesn’t evaporate.  So, the salt isn’t pulled up into the air… only the water.  As luck would have it, worms don’t evaporate either.  So they don’t fall with the rain.

Believe it or not, even though there are lots and lots of worms, they crawled there.

Thanks for the question! Wow.