Giant Earthworms Destroy Rice Terraces

Giant earthworms, 12- to 15-inches long, have slowly been destroying rice terraces in the Cordillera mountain ranges in the Philippines in the last decade. Some terraces are as old as the Pyramids of Egypt, circa 3,000 to 3,500 years. As of this writing, the extent is not known. Research and updates by the Department of Agriculture is suggested.

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Updated August 7, 2023 – Archives tr130
By Bernie V. Lopez, eastwindreplyctr@gmail.com

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Author’s Note. This article is based on a field trip by the author circa early 1990s, with extensive interviews of elderlies who knew ancestral oral history, and tribal engineers who were experts in the ancient art of building rice terraces handed down through oral history. There are no updates on the present status. Research and field surveys by the Department of Agriculture (DA) are suggested.

According to geologists, the art of building terraces probably originated in Burma and China, brought here by Malay migrants during the Austronesian Dispersal. ‘Austronesian’ refers to a massive group of boat people who populated 10,000 kilometers of coastline in the thousands of islands surrounding mainland China, within a period of 1,500 years, the fastest, and widest human expansion of prehistoric times.

The first Malays, arriving in the Philippine archipelago on makeshift wooden boats, settled on the lush coastal areas. After a few decades, they were driven to the inhospitable interior mountains by other arriving superior Malays. They were forced to build the rice terraces their ancestors taught them to survive.

Such were the Igorots of the Cordillera mountain ranges in Luzon, who painstakingly carved rice terraces for centuries. The ancient rice terraces have endured storms and earthquakes for many millennia, but now, a new threat – giant earthworms as long as 12 to 15 inches long and as thick as human finger – are ironically destroying these ancient rice fortresses.

The giant earthworms thrive a few feet below the surface of the rice terrace. Earthworms do not like too much water, so when a storm comes and the terrace soil is water-saturated, they squeeze themselves between the rocks of terrace stone walls, creating holes.

These holes are insignificant, but are eroded gradually through time. They become bigger until, finally, they breach the surface walls, say after two to five years of constant storms. Once the hole is breached, water can rapidly erode the hole until it becomes larger and larger.  If there are many holes in one terrace, a sudden big storm can cause the instant collapse of the entire structurally-weakened terrace wall. It takes years for the holes to form, and only seconds to cause a collapse.

The giant earthworms are not indigenous to the Cordillera mountains. The elderlies say that they were brought in from lowland rice farms, particularly from Pangasinan province, by rice-terrace farmers seeking new rice species to plant. The earthworm eggs were tiny and almost invisible, lodged in the roots, hard to shake off even washing and during travel.

The new hybrid varieties grew faster and yielded bigger harvests, but required massive fertilizer and pesticide use, destroying the ancient terrace soil. The shift to new varieties was irreversible because ancient varieties could no longer grow in the chemical-laden soil. The chemicals mixed in the soil could not be removed. The infected terraces were beyond rehabilitation. Importation of new rice varieties yielded regression rather than progress.

To eradicate the earthworms, farmers planted sunflower shrubs around the terraces areas, whose roots the earthworms hated. (Sunflower leaves were used as cockroach-repellant ‘floor wax’ in their homes.) The earthworms were reduced a bit, but they were not completely eradicated. Global research revealed that giant earthworm infestation was prevalent in other rice terraces in Southeast Asia. A lot of other ‘ingenious’ approaches also did not work. They used deadly chemicals, but still the earthworms thrived. It was a dead-end. The Goliath earthworm seemed invincible, unless new solutions are discovered.

Few of our rice terraces are ancient and rare, but they are monuments and legacies of our ancestry and heritage, more than just productive farms. They are anthropological monuments reflecting the wisdom of ancient agriculture and engineering. Both new and old terraces, built through the centuries, are dying due to the Goliath earthworm. The extent is not known as of this writing.

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