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There are people out there who are actually out to charm worms. Not by taking them out to dinner or by whispering sweet nothings in the ears they do not have, mind you, but by doing some strange motions with custom tools of the trade. Worm charming is actually an old fashioned art form and profession, which has mostly fallen out of common practice. However, it does still exist in limited places and through limited numbers of people, if only to ensure that this once highly useful skill remains in this world until there are no more people left to catch worms, and to use them in turn to catch fish.
Some people will charm worms through moistening the soil. This can be done through the sprinkling of beer, water or some other type of liquid onto the ground. While most worm charming competitions have banned the use of detergents in the moistening process (as it can also help the other methods to be more effective but harms the local ecosystem), a worm who perceives himself to be under imminent threat of drowning will most likely surface to breathe.
Most of the trade of worm charming involves specially vibrating the soil, so that it resembles the vibrational patterns of the types of moles which feed on the worms themselves. In a lot of cases, this is all that it takes to cause the worms to want to surface and attempt to save their own lives. The fact that a lot of birds will also do the exact same thing in order to eat these worms just shows that worms learn very slowly. However, the sport of worm charming has actually caught on enough for competitions.
