Snakes alive! Huge worms seen in Scotland

A recent tabloid headline ran ‘Giant worms the size of snakes are discovered by scientists on abandoned Scottish island’, Richard Collins

The paper went on to assure readers that there was “little to fear from the giant creatures, as earthworms tend to avoid people”. What a relief! Where would we be if the worms decided to stand their ground? Even broadsheets got in on the act; ‘it sounds like the stuff of nightmares’ declared The Telegraph.

Nor are such attitudes new. “Then worms shall try your long preserved virginity” was Andrew Marvel’s chat-up line to “his coy mistress” four centuries ago. The reluctant girlfriend had something to fear, but not from the worms; eating corpses isn’t their thing. That’s the prerogative of maggots, the larvae of blow-flies. Worm hatred is even enshrined in our language; ‘vermin’ from ‘vermis’, Latin for ‘worm’, dates back to Old French.