MY GREATEST FEAR

There are things in life that we fear that even us who experience it can’t explain. I don’t actually know the scientific explanation, all I know is that this is psychological, the fear also known as phobia.
I have this one fear that I just can’t explain and this is the fear of earthworms. I just don’t understand why I am so afraid of worms. Maybe it’s because of its structure which scares me. I hate seeing things that squirms no matter how colorful that thing is, it makes me shiver. And here is the challenge, our research study deals with the African Night crawlers. Our study was entitled “the effects of different feeds on the growth and amount of worm castings produced by the African Night Crawlers” Wonder what it is? It is just my hatest thing on earth, earthworms. My groupmates challenged me to touch our specimen for once in my life, they allowed me to use a glove, and so I tried. An echo filled our laboratory and everybody was annoyed by the loud scream I produced. I just can’t take it touching a worm. Even with a glove, I can feel its body stretching and I just feel like it is so grouse. After touching the earthworm it feels like its body is still on my hands. And I concluded that maybe I will never learn to love earthworms but I really do appreciate them.
African night crawlers is a big help to our farmers, they produce worm castings that are said to be five times more fertile than ordinary soil mixture. Plus, they feed on anything that is biodegradable, you can feed them with paper, cardboard, vegetable, anything and they will transform it to the richest topsoil on earth. So this means, through their worm castings, we need not to import chemical fertilizers which only add to the government’s burden. Also, African night crawlers can just be raised at home. They not only help the government but also help in the solid waste management. In fact, there is a place in Cebu where residents raise such specie to help in solid waste management and at the same time to earn income while at home. That place is Barrio Luz, it is where we obtained our specimens and asked tips on how to raise earthworms because the first set of earthworms we bought suddenly died.
Everytime we check our specimens at the lab, I have been the official recorder of their length and mass since my senses can’t take the earthworms. At the end of the first semester, we were done conducting the study and I have said to myself that I will be missing our earthworms. I have already loved them but not physically. However, our findings gave us a conclusion that feeds don’t really matter in terms of their production of worm castings but their masses do. The heavier the earthworms are, the greater the amount of worm castings they produce. The group of earthworms who produced the most amount of worm castings was the vegetable group. Nevertheless, they still feed on anything that is biodegradable and they even live without any feed but with water. Thanks to the African night crawlers, through them we have discovered something that can be very useful to our economy.