Park rangers in Texas had thought someone left spaghetti in the middle of the road.
Instead, the piles in the middle of Eisenhower State Park were actually worms, Park Superintendent Ben Herman told ABC News today.
Rangers were checking the back roads of the park in Denison, Texas, found on May 29 when they found the piles lined up in a near-perfect straight line.
“We’re still puzzled why they decided to line up in the middle of the road,” Herman said. “Even our biologist doesn’t know why they’re spaced so well and in the line.”
Rangers decided to poke the piles with a stick to ensure that there were only worms in the spaghetti-looking clumps.
The worms stayed for two days before heading back into the soil and leaving behind their manure, Herman added.
Park officials now have two theories to why the worms came out in herds. Herman said the first is the heavy rains saturated the ground so much that the water forced the worms onto the dryer parts of the pavement. The second theory is rain may sound like predators beating down on the ground to the worms, so they move and clump together to avoid them.
The piles were only found in the back part of the state park that was closed off to vehicles because of flooding. Herman noted that no other Texas state parks reported the same phenomenon.
“We were all fascinated by what happened,” he said. “It was pretty entertaining to watch the worms do their thing.”
Eisenhower State Park covers more than 450 acres of land about an hour from the Oklahoma state border.