Asian Jumping Worms

Has anyone encountered these?

https://www.tsusinvasives.org/home/database/amynthas-spp-#:~:text=Amynthas%20jumping%20worms%20inhabit%20the,near%20the%20end%20of%20summer.

I just bought a tree at a local nursery in San Antonio, dug hole, pulled pot off and 10 large jumping worms fell out and flailed around. By then, half the soil from pot was all over the hole.

How concerned should I be once I threw away the tree, pot and as much soil as I could scrape away?

You want to know about jumping worms? Ohh I'll tell you about jumping worms! I however live in New York and they just have just started to migrate to my area in the last few years.

You can tell where they are by their coffee ground like burrows they have near the surface. Their egg sacs are really difficult to detect. Not a whole lot of things like to eat them.

I'm curated a few threads for you to look at for more information.

1. https://permies.com/t/239353/jumping-worms
2. https://permies.com/t/180524/invasive-jumping-worms-area
3. https://permies.com/t/87279/Dealing-jumping-worms
4. https://permies.com/t/134101/Worms-bad-Jumping-Worms-invading

I hope this might help you.

Thank you Timothy,

I had seen some of those resources, so was alarmed.

Most of the discussion seems to be based in other regions that tend to be wetter, colder and perhaps more forested than ours.

I wonder if the local central/south Texas regional experience would be any different.

I have not seen them, I am in the Hill country almost in West Texas.

Jamie said, I wonder if the local central/south Texas regional experience would be any different.

Maybe 10 times worse? I don't know.

They have always called them Alabama Jumpers and also Wigglers since the 1970s in the southern usa.  My grandfather used to sell them in Galveston Texas in the 1920s to fishermen.  They have been in Alabama long enough to name them after Alabama by 1920s. They were around my gardens in the Florida panhandle all my life and I am 57. They really are no different than the 100 or so native north american earth worms or the 49 introduced ones except they wiggle themselves to death when they're scared. Yes there are well over one hundred varieties of earthworm native to north america. There is misinformation on the internet. Alabama Jumpers  have the exact same food source and same digestive system as all other earthworms. They make absolutely the best fishing worms in the world and have made Alabama some of the richest farmland in the south. They are an excellent earthworm with nothing but benefits to offer us and have done no destruction to other earthworms or ecosystems anywhere in the hundred or more years in the southern United States or their former part of Earth.