Earthworm Love is Cuddly...and Complicated

Earthworm love.

It’s cuddly … and complicated.

From the start, the earthworm is built  for romance, with four or five pairs of hearts.

Finding a match, though?

That’s a challenge  for these mostly solitary animals.

They go out looking when they’re a few months  to a year old, and they’ve grown this fleshy,   saddle-shaped patch, called a clitellum.

They’re  now mature enough to get down to business.

Tube-shaped invertebrate seeks mate  to share loamy soil and good times.

The earthworm follows tastes and smells through  dirt or leaf litter to find its valentine.

It crawls around by anchoring its body  with these bristles called setae … … then pushing forward with its muscles.

Along the way, it fuels up on bacteria  and tiny fungi in the soil and leaves,   sucking them in with its mouth.

Such a luscious … lip?

Every earthworm has some non-negotiables: Must  breathe through iridescent skin.

Must want kids.

But male or female is not one of them.

All earthworms are both.

They’re hermaphrodites,   which automatically doubles  their chances of finding a mate.

When they do, they waste no time.

Side by side, they surround each other with  rings of slime they exude from their skin,   bodies pointing in opposite directions.

And they embrace with these flaps on their clitella.

They can canoodle like this  for an hour, swapping sperm.

It travels outside their bodies, here,  where they press up against each other,   and flows between these segments  into storage sacs inside.

But their tender act has a dark side.

As they do the deed, the earthworms  stab each other with their pointy setae.

Those wounds mean the injured lovers won’t be  hooking up with others anytime soon.

Jealous much?

After they’ve parted ways, each earthworm  produces a sheath with its clitellum and shimmies it down its tubular body.

The protein-rich ring moves over   tiny holes where it gathers eggs  and some of the collected sperm.

Then, it slips right off the  worm and becomes a cocoon.

Baby worms flourish inside,   growing beating hearts that one day  they’ll give to their special someone.