Car Battery to collect night crawlers?

[Oldgeek]

When I was a kid my dad brought home and old crank telephone he'd pick up cheap. He made that into a worm driver. My job was to crank the telephone after he had the rods and wires hooked up...not while he was doing it. I got a whoopen for that one. :lol:

 

[baseball_guy_99]

The worm rod works well. My uncle used to have one that plugged into an outlet and was attached to a 100' extension cord and thats how we always collected our bait. As stated above...wear shoes, don't touch the rod, and wait til the rod is out of the ground before you grab for the worms.

 

[linehand]

This is the what my grandfather did for getting nightcrawlers. There is no danger grabbing probes to a 12v battery. There is enough current to make the worms uncomfortable but there are not enough volts to push through human skin. and yes I would think after a rain or wetting the ground would work better. You would have a small area to spread out the probes that would depend on the type of soil and moisture. I don't think sandy soil would work well. I would try a battery charger on like the 200 amp setting if possible. I wouldn't use A/C.
This is my opinion only.

 

[DocWatson]

A much better and safer way to get all the worms you want is to dig in a manure heap.

My grandfather used to keep rabbits for show and eating in rows of hutches out behind his house. Whenever we wanted to go fiahing, we just went out behind the rabbit hutches, turned over a few pitchforks full and had all the worms we could ever want.

Just don't lick your fingers while you're doin' it. [-X :wink:

 

[Jasonalex84]

We always used either the hand crank telephone or the electric fencer. The later seemed to work the best because it for a number of reasons:
1. The barn was surrounded by manure.
2. There was no set up time. It already had a grounding rod drove 15ft into the ground and another peice of rebar drove about 4ft into the ground located about 8-10 inches away from the fence. The only thing you had to do is talk your current best friend into pushing the rebar into the fence and holding it there for a bit. I got a ton of worms that way.......

 

[bobberboy]

Car battery, wet ground, probes, sounds like a bad accident waiting to happen.

Just before hooking up the battery you have yell "Hey, watch this".

...or "Here, hold my beer".

I actually think this works. I vaguely remember reading about this a while ago. Also, for any of you who might have seen the American version of Godzilla that was made about 12 years ago, the opening scene is of a biologist doing this very thing on the grounds of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Russia. Of course, due to the radioactivity at the site, the night crawlers are the size of snakes.