What is this critter a centipede like thing? (ID: wire worm)

under soil about a foot, about an inch long, and several legs up front with a blackish head.  Found about 3 of them over past couple of days digging.  :) fed them to my fire ants.

Google "wire worm" -- maybe that?

Dan Boone wrote:Google "wire worm" -- maybe that?

Yes I think you did a great job ID this pest, TU Dan.

You are welcome! I came across a HUGE one in my potting soil this spring and found it alarming, had to ID it; I had never seen a worm with a hard exoskeleton.

However as I am not a big potato grower,  I’m not sure I would count it as a pest. The research I did was telling me it’s one of the many larval/enstar stages of the many species of click beetles, which are generally beneficial to have around considering they are big bugs that eat a lot of little plant nibblers.

Dan Boone wrote:You are welcome! I came across a HUGE one in my potting soil this spring and found it alarming, had to ID it; I had never seen a worm with a hard exoskeleton.

However as I am not a big potato grower,  I’m not sure I would count it as a pest. The research I did was telling me it’s one of the many larval/enstar stages of the many species of click beetles, which are generally beneficial to have around considering they are big bugs that eat a lot of little plant nibblers.

I counted 3 of these larval like in my picture, when digging two 3x25 beds, plus two back to back hugelkultu setups.   They are worst than we think, I read they attack seeds planted (corn, beans. etc.) in the larval stage!  My ant colonies enjoyed the 3 wireworms, and 2? Japanese beetles.  Also read how you can attract them by partial bury of a potato piece.  Wow, potting soil!

Michael Moreken wrote:Wow, potting soil!

I was typing in haste on my mobile so that's actually an oversimplification -- actually I have a pile of old wood chips that has composted down into good black dirt, and I was digging it out to put in my container garden containers when I encountered my first huge wire worm, almost five cm long.  I was more interested in getting a photo than in grabbing hold of scary looking unknown arthropod, so it burrowed back down into the dirt in my garden container, where it presumably lived out its life cycle; I never noticed a problem.



Anyway, now that I'm back at my desk I dug up the research I did then.  You are of course the best judge of what's welcome in your garden, but my own conclusion for me is that these things are as beneficial as it gets for organic gardeners, although they might be pretty rough on monocrop gardeners who spray weedkiller and insecticides.  

This Virginia Cooperative Extension publication puts it as clearly as anybody could wish:

Wireworms are omnivores, preferentially feeding on other soil insects or roots of grasses and weeds. In agricultural crops, where weeds are killed and land is cultivated, wireworms seek out the only food available, which are the underground portions of the planted crop.

That doesn't sound like my garden, which has plenty of soil insects and weed roots for the wire worms to feed on.  

There's a really pretty picture of a huge wireworm very much like the one I found, at this this link.

From the various sources I was browsing during the research I did on the critters, I got the impression that they really would prefer to be forest-floor critters, with their most happiest habitat being decomposing wood like the old chip pile where I found the one shown in my photo above.  That suggests to me that if a permaculture gardener was suffering wireworm damage in a particular root crop, you might be able to draw them up and out the root zone of that crop simply by mulching really well with old wood chips that are simply brimming with animal life.  (My decomposed chips were utterly brimming with pill bugs, earthworms, and a zillion small insects when I was digging from that pile this spring, and that's just the macro stuff that I could see without magnification.) In other words, offer the wireworms a better deal!

Dan Boone wrote: (My decomposed chips were utterly brimming with pill bugs, earthworms, and a zillion small insects when I was digging from that pile this spring, and that's just the macro stuff that I could see without magnification.) In other words, offer the wireworms a better deal!

I saw no earthworms in the wood chips but did see pill bugs, or rolly pollies