Nagoya City Science Museum

Purpose of Exhibition

Humans can not live in an environment comprising solely of humans. They can not live on this earth without living together with various other creatures. Many of us tend to forget this fact, but let's consider our familiar garden. In a garden, we can observe the eco system in which animals and plants are interacting with each other.
This exhibit reproduces a garden with a field and a pond and introduces and explains what kinds of creatures inhabit the garden, including its underground and how they live.

Additional Knowledge

The action of wormsWorms are one of the hidden themes in this exhibit. You may think worms can do only small things because they are too small a creature to perform larger tasks. But thanks to earth worms, rich soil can be made.
Making SoilWorms eat fallen leaves and expel feces, and the ejected feces changes into nutritious soil helping plants grow well. Without worms, fallen leaves will not decompose, and be left on the ground. Only worms create soil. However, we can hardly imagine such a little creature is the leading part of earth, creating many forests stretching over the earth. Darwin studied scientific evidence and wrote a thesis about worms.
Why are remains buried under the soil?Darwin started to observe worms and studied them very hard. They dig tunnels under the ground and live there. Darwin tried to keep some worms and researched about them thoroughly: for example, how do they pull fallen leaves into their tunnels, how many worms are there, what kind of structure does their body have, can they feel lights and sounds. He thoroughly investigated and finally found out that such small creatures continued to make soil, and that many buildings and stones on the ground were getting buried gradually by the action of worms.
The theory of evolution and wormsA large number of worms can accomplish great things even if each of them can do only little things individually. This fact is related to the theory of evolution. Darwin said that according to his studies, new species are born after repeating several mutations. He wrote a book about worms in his latest years. It was not written about the theory of evolution but we might say all of his ideas were deeply based on that.

Article by Tetsuro Ojio, curator