I'm afraid I have to respectfully disagree with folks that say that these worms improve the soil. This is both my anecdotal experience and what forest ecologists are saying. The latter is easily researched using google scholar or even watching academic presentations on youtube, so I'll focus on my and my friends' experiences. Using permaculture principles, I spent 6 years improving the soil from lawn to garden on my 1/3 acre, and it was developing beautiful tilth and stuff was happy. These worms came in about two years ago and destroyed it in less than one. For example, in one area I had been in the process of mulching a bed when I ran out of time, leaving a pile of arborists about a foot tall that I had been planning on spreading. They ate it. It literally disappeared leaving a pile of clay in its place. This is at the base of a stone wall, so judging the relative height of the ground level is simple. Any castings of organic matter sit on top of the soil beneath the duff layer like ball bearings, and they just flow away with any water. I have a number of areas where they collect, and I've experimented with trying to get the to incorporate with the soil layer, and it just doesn't work.
In my main food producing beds, the story is the same. They eat the organic matter and leave the castings on top. It washes away, and the soil compacts on its own. The mulch disappears leaving bare soil. There's no layer anymore where the distinction between mulch and soil blends. It's just mulch on top of clay. My annuals don't do well anymore, although my established deep-rooted perennials are doing fine. In response, we are re-contouring our beds to direct the castings inward, but I'm not sure how mulch that'll help.
These worms are voracious, as well. Their metabolism is much higher than European earthworms, so they eat far more. In one presentation I watched, the vermologist (yep, that's a worm scientist) was comparing the two types (there are multiple species of each), and he said that your average european earthworm lives about five years and in that time moves no more than 30 feet. The jumping worm lives only a single year, and in that time it can travel 300 feet.
I've tried the mustard water to get them to come to the surface, but that doesn't seem to make much of a difference. Saponin compounds are supposed to be toxic to them, but they are also toxic to amphibians and other soft-bodied animals, so that's out. My plan for this coming year is to use a fungal control that's showing promise. It's very cutting edge, but I'm basically going to follow the lab protocol below, but instead of doing it in a controlled bucket, I'm going to treat half my beds and leave the other half alone. We will see. In short, you inoculate millet with a fungal product that's sold to the greenhouse industry, and it acts as a bait. The fungus is toxic to the worms, but it has to be ingested. I'll definitely be reporting my results here on permies.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8035901/
