If you’re an angler — and not too high hat — there’s a lot to be said for good old garden-variety worms. After all, they’re among the oldest and most basic forms of fishing, and in the right hands, incredibly effective.
What’s more, worms have been there since the beginning. Chances are, your first angling experience went something like this — Mom or Dad brought you out to an inland lake one Saturday morning. Carefully threading a nightcrawler onto a hook, they lobbed out a cast and handed over the rod. “Be patient,” came the encouragement. “When the bobber goes under, start reeling.” If all went according to the plan, a bass or bluegill eventually inhaled the bait and presto, an angler was born.
Mine was a similar story. Like so many other Gen-X kids, I landed my first sunfish on a leaf worm dangled beneath a red-and-white plastic bobber. Eventually, worms gave way to artificial lures and soft plastics, and from there to flies, but plenty of anglers stick with tried-and-true garden hackle for life.
Live bait has a lot going in its favor, and worm fishing is simple and economical, especially if you procure them yourself. Plus, the options are almost endless. Walleye anglers troll worms from crawler harnesses, and panfish aficionados delight in bouncing lead jigs along the bottom. Light-line trout enthusiasts manipulate leaf worms along log jams in ways that would make a professional puppeteer envious.
The life of a devoted bait angler extends far beyond fishing. I spent many a misty summer evening in the eighties prospecting for bait with my dad. The only requirements were a sharp set of eyes, nimble hands, and cat-like reflexes… plus, a repurposed Peter Pan peanut-butter bucket and a red-lens flashlight. It was a simpler era, to be sure.
Night crawlers (Lumbricus terrestris) are probably the most popular arthropod among anglers. Logic would suggest that larger bait must appeal to bigger fish. That was my philosophy, anyway, and thus far no one’s been able to convince me otherwise. My frugal-minded grandfather, however, always split the difference, pinching the bait into quarters with his thumbnail, which made me retch as a kid.
Worms may be the ultimate paradox. They seem simple, but in fact they’re quite complex. For instance, night crawlers are 80% water, have five hearts, and 150 body segments. They grow approximately an inch per year, achieving viable bait proportions by age seven. Furthermore, they’re blind, but very sensitive to light and vibrations, which explains why a dim, red-lens flashlight works better than a bright white beam for capturing them.
Clearly, fish view worms as a culinary delight, but what do they taste like? I wouldn’t know, but my childhood buddy Steener does. Back in elementary school, he ate a pale, waterlogged specimen on a dare. “Wasn’t too bad,” he claimed afterward. Fish almost universally agree, but Steener is the only human I personally know who’s intentionally sampled a worm. Then again, he’s a different breed.
Speaking of breeding, night crawlers reach sexual maturity by age 2, laying eggs in permanent subterranean burrows every 10 days or so. In layman’s terms, that means a single crawler can produce over 1.5 million wormlings annually, each of which have the potential to live to the ripe old age of 20 years old, which seems like an awfully long time.
Live bait is basically free when gathered in pro per, as the attorneys say. That said, buying worms is still cheaper than lures and articulated streamers, and this didn’t go unnoticed by Walter Swiderski. You may not recognize Walter by his full name (I didn’t, either), but chances are you’ve heard of Walt’s Crawlers, and we can’t really discuss worms without weaving in some history about the Midwest godfather of live bait.
Walt’s idea took shape in 1983 just north of Gaylord, when he recognized a niche market among anglers, and began distributing live bait to gas stations and convenience stores. Available options included wax worms, Belgian worms, and red worms, green crawlers and night crawlers, leaches, and spawn – all told, a lot of creepy crawlers under one roof! Of course, anglers – or rather, fish – have always been Walt’s primary consumers, but exotic pet owners buy them as food for snakes, chameleons, and turtles.
Walter ran the worm biz for nearly 15 years before selling to Rick and Becky Cope in 1997, and they retained the name. In 2021, the business changed hands again, this time to the DMF Bait Co., of Waterford, Michigan. DMF still carries Walt’s Crawlers, but only in night-crawler form. Other offerings, such as red worms, wax worms, butter worms, meal worms, and spikes, fall beneath DMF’s brand umbrella.
Commercial worm cultivation continues to be a delicate process. Even in this modern digital age of automated labor and artificial intelligence, no one has invented a suitably sensitive mechanical substitute for extracting worms from the soil. In short, human hands remain the most effective method for harvesting them. It’s hard to imagine that we’ve found techniques to split atoms and perform laparoscopic surgery, but we can’t figure out the worm gig.
As a kid, I always felt squeamish about harpooning a worm on a hook. The liver heart in me wondered if it hurt having the metallic equivalent of a telephone pole pushed through your body. It couldn’t feel good, I surmised. Humanitarians can rest easy, however. Scientists say worms aren’t able to process complex emotional information and therefore can’t feel pain.
Despite advancements in tackle over the last few decades, worms are still among the most effective means for catching fish. Fly anglers and lure enthusiasts can debate their piscatorial preferences at length, but in the end there’s no (ahem) worming away from the facts.