Which One is a Harmful Invasive Species?

Five animals found while turning and sifting the soil in
my garden to remove an old strawberry bed.
Photo by Brad Sylvester, copyright 2012.

One of the tasks I had to take care of today was pulling out an old strawberry bed to prepare the plot to become a vegetable garden this year. I moved a number of new strawberry plants to a new plot last fall. Pulling out the old plants involves shoveling and sifting roots out of the soil. Well any good garden soil is home to a community of organisms and mine is no different.

As I turned over the soil and pulled out the old roots and plants, I found a number of tiny creatures living in the soil and I put a few of them aside to detail for this blog. Each will get its own entry, but I just wanted to take a minute to show you what I dug up. Mind you I wasn't really searching carefully and I undoubtedly missed a number of smaller creatures.

Nevertheless, there are five distinct animals in the picture. Although, to be fair, it's possible that fewer than five species are represented if any of the grubs are larval beetles. I don't think they are, because I'd expect each species from a given sample plot to be in close to the same stage of development at this point.

Without going into research to formally identify theses species, I can tell that at least one of them is an invasive species to New England brought over from either Europe or Asia (depending upon which of several species it turns out to be) and is potentially a harmful invader to forests like those in my backyard. Which one is it? Believe it or not it's the earthworm although there may be others in this group as well. I haven't closely examined or identified them yet, but the smaller white grub in the top center of the picture could be a Japanese beetle larva which would make it a harmful invasive species as well.

While earthworms might be good for the garden, several common varieties are quite bad for forested eco-systems, but I'll dig into that a bit more on the individual species page when I post it.
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