Illustration: A female holloworm ensnares a pocket gopher.
If we consider the pocket gopher as the architect of the rural underground, the giant holloworm is the leech. Not exactly a “worm” in the usual sense, holloworms are anatomically tubular and conform their thin bodies to tunnel walls, allowing free passage to gophers and other critters. In the rare event that these deep tunnel dwellers are dug up, they’re inevitably overlooked as slimy dirt or a decomposed sock. Most interestingly, the male holloworms traverse tunnels conveyor-style with the same inside-out motion as those “slippery water snake" toys from 1983. Gastronomic pacifists, they mainly absorb nutrients from the soil, which clings readily to it’s sticky exterior, which is technically-speaking, an inverted digestive tract. Females on the other hand don’t travel by their own locomotion. Instead, they tend one spot until opportunity allows them to clamp onto an unsuspecting passer-through, such as a gopher or snake, or cling stickily to a male holloworm, which will typically flat-roll her conveyor-style through several-hundred yards of tunnel, leaving behind a goopy film of fertilized residue, which matures with time into new holloworms.
