Scientist seeks to uncover secrets of giant worm

McMINNVILLE, Ore. - Dorothy McKey-Fender has worms in her refrigerator.

The 83-year-old woman also stores the little critters, some decades old, in test tubes - hundreds of them, corked and filled with formaldehyde.

Others sit in boxes, plastic tubs and old Bertolli olive oil cans.

"See these little guys?" she said, retrieving a tube and glancing at the label. "Carlton Highway. 1979.

"They're all new species," she said, gesturing to the shelf where the little guys that were dug up at the Carlton Highway 20 years ago have resided all this time. "I haven't gotten around to them yet."

McKey-Fender is an oligochaetologist, a scientist who studies few-bristled worms.

An intellectually dexterous woman, she rarely uses technical jargon with lay people and offers "oligochaetologist" only when asked.

"I won't give you the scientific names," she said, when talking about the worms she's spent a lifetime studying. "People wouldn't be interested in them."

Although she last taught at Portland State University in the 1960s and officially retired in 1980, she still has a passion for her research.

Earlier this month, she teamed up with a coalition of public and private groups, including the U.S. Geological Survey and the Oregon Natural Heritage Program, to offer a workshop on the Oregon giant earthworm at Linfield College.

The purpose was to train students and professionals to find and identify the elusive worm - a species she hasn't seen alive since the 1980s.

In the vast and wildly diverse world of invertebrates, it's the Oregon giant that intrigues McKey-Fender.

"We have a native earthworm that's very imperfectly known," she said. "And that's what I've been doing all these years, is studying them."

McKey-Fender and other scientists say more than 100 worms are native to the Pacific Northwest, but the ones you're likely to dig up in your garden or see on the sidewalk after a heavy rain are not among them.

Those, she said, are "weeds," invaders brought here by Europeans.

But the giants - they are another story.

The Oregon giant lives deeper in the valley's soil than nonnatives.

McKey-Fender's father came to Oregon when he was 7, and she remembers his stories about farmers finding the giant worms when plowing. "I have heard a couple people say they did see these worms when they were children, and they thought it was a snake," she said.

The worm has been known scientifically since 1937, when a live specimen was found in Salem.

One was found in McMinnville in the 1980s, which was the last time McKey-Fender saw one herself, during a digging expedition near Dayton at Palmer Creek.

She also recalls when her husband Kenneth found a giant worm near Turner Creek. As he picked up the harmless creature, it contracted as worms often do when handled, and spit - about four feet.

The saliva, McKey-Fender recalls with a smile, had the aroma of flowers.

"It was quite an experience," she said.

McKey-Fender doesn't get out into the field much anymore. But with the help of her son William Fender-Westwind, she still catalogs new worm species.

So little is known about McKey-Fender's main interest, the giant worm, that federal scientists say they don't have enough information to list it as an endangered species, Jacobs said.

As of now, the worm is regarded as "a species of concern."

Her research is all the more important, some say, because she is one of about a dozen or so scientists who focus on the worm.

"Invertabra, in general, are not very well-studied," said Dan Rosenberg, an assistant professor in Oregon State University's Department of Fisheries and Wildlife who said he knew little about worms before he started working with McKey-Fender about a year ago.

"People just aren't aware of the diversity."

The giant worm, McKey-Fender said, is disappearing from the valley for precisely the reason that interest in ecology has grown: Native habitat is vanishing under farmer's fields, logging operations and development.

"If we don't do something about it, it's all going to go to pot," she said. "Humans are not treating the Earth right."

A few weeks ago, McKey-Fender accompanied a group of students to the Dayton area to dig. The Webfoot area, near Palmer Creek, is the last place she saw an Oregon giant native alive.

No surprise, given its apparently diminishing numbers and the ease with which it evades curious humans.

"They do not move very fast laterally," she said. "But if you're digging for them and you stimulate them, they can go down very rapidly."

Don't expect to find one in your garden, McKey-Fender says, and don't even bother looking during the summer, when the ground is dry and the worm retreats toward the water table.

She thinks they are more likely to be found along the valley's edges and river bluffs, and near the Coast Range.

"The Oregon giant may or may not be extinct," she said. "We have not found them yet. But we think we will."