In This Tiny Town in Florida’s Panhandle, Fishermen Are Hooked on ‘Worm Grunting,’ and the Worms Are Still Taking the Bait

Luring earthworms out of the soil to use as live bait is a long-running tradition in Sopchoppy, home to the annual Worm Gruntin’ Festival

Stephanie Castellano | Freelance writer

April 20, 2026

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Snap Revell knelt on the ground and gripped his rooping iron with both hands. “Funnel cakes,” he muttered under his breath. He pinched some dirt from the ground and rubbed it on his hands before regripping the iron, a stubby paddle with a handle made slippery by festival-food grease.

Traction restored to the iron, Revell bent over his stob, a short wooden stake that he’d hammered into the ground. With steady strokes, he began to run the iron back and forth across the top of the stob, producing a long, flatulence-like sound that sent vibrations deep into the soil.

Around us, the air filled with similar ripping sounds, followed by giggles and excited chatter. Children and adults bent with irons in hand, cheerfully sawing away at their own stobs. The cacophony was meant to literally shake the ground, and in doing so, scare up the earthworms hiding there.

This is “worm grunting,” a technique for conjuring earthworms out of soil to use as live bait for fishing. The tiny town of Sopchoppy, Florida, is famous for it—so much so that its annual Worm Gruntin’ Festival draws thousands of visitors. On this bright Saturday in April, families from near and far joined Sopchoppy natives—like the Revell family—to learn the method for themselves. Revell and his father, Gary, had been leading worm-grunting demonstrations all morning.

“Don’t fight the iron,” Snap instructed me, as I tried to mimic his motions across the stob. People wandered by with cups of either worms or boiled peanuts as banjo music thrummed in the background and the smell of sausages and frying oil hung in the air. A man paused as he walked by and gave Revell a genial thump on the shoulder.

“He just read the instructions this morning; he don’t know what he’s doing,” the passerby joked to me, gesturing to my teacher. Revell smiled. He comes from four generations of Sopchoppy worm grunters, a fact I read later in the town’s tiny museum. The Revells were one of many families in Sopchoppy who, up until a few decades ago, made a living charming worms out of the ground and selling them to bait shops around north Florida and up into Georgia.

“Worm gruntin’ is how my dad paid for my college,” the man continued. “Worm gruntin’ and killin’ gators.” He chatted with Revell for a couple minutes before moving on through the crowd.

The "magic" of worm grunting

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A town known for its worms

Sopchoppy is a “blink and you’ll miss it” kind of town, where the population has hovered around 500 for many years. Its corner of northwest Florida is still mostly rural, thanks to large tracts of conservation land and the considerable distance from sprawling, throbbing metropolises like Tampa and Orlando. The quiet road into town runs through forests and over rivers, flanked occasionally by churches and modest ranch-style houses. Roadside signs announce local goods for sale: “Bait,” “Mayhaw Jelly,” “Cane Syrup” and “Mr. Bobby Tupelo Honey.”

The town perches on the banks of the Sopchoppy River, which winds—much like a worm—through fertile swamplands to join the Ochlockonee River just before it flows into Ochlockonee Bay on to the gulf. Alligators, turtles and many species of fish cruise the river, its waters tinted bronze by tannic acid.

The proximity to so much water—salt and fresh—has historically been a boon to local fishermen. And the rich, damp soil around Sopchoppy is the perfect habitat for earthworms.

“They’re so vigorous and long-lasting, they’re really the very best bait,” said Nelson Martin, a local historian and curator of Sopchoppy’s Depot Museum (so called because the museum exists in the town’s former train depot). I’d been told to speak with “Mr. Nelson” to get the historical overview of worm grunting in Sopchoppy. After I emailed, and before I had a chance to call, my phone rang. “This is Nelson, with the worms,” he announced when I picked up.

Martin explained that worm grunting took off at the end of the 19th century, when the railroad came through Sopchoppy. Railroad workers began buying and selling Sopchoppy worms, which are a native species known as Diplocardia mississippiensis. (Many earthworm species in North America today are nonnative, having been imported from Europe in flowerpots and other containers of foreign soil.) Before long, a thriving trade in Diplocardia was being done all over town. There was even a local “worm dealer,” M.B. Hodge, who sold worms to more than 100 bait retailers across the region. “Everyone brought their worms to his store,” Martin told me. Sopchoppy children learned to count by tallying earthworms, 500 to a one-gallon can. In a 1973 cover story for its Sunday magazine, the St. Petersburg Times called Sopchoppy “the city that lives on worms.”

How does worm grunting work?

Why vibrations in the ground cause earthworms to wriggle to the surface was first postulated by Charles Darwin in his 1881 book The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms. Darwin’s theory was that the worms interpret the vibrations as moles, their top predator, digging into the soil after them. They emerge in an attempt to flee.

In 2008, Kenneth Catania, a biologist at Vanderbilt University, decided to test this theory in Sopchoppy. He strode into the woods with Gary Revell and Gary’s wife, Audrey, armed with a rooping iron, stob, geophones (for measuring ground vibrations) and tiny flags (for marking where the worms emerged from the soil). As the iron rubbed melodiously across the stob, worms began to sprout from the soil. They moved fast: “If a worm could ever be described as running, I would say this was the time,” Catania later wrote in an article for the Scientific American.

Catania then tested the worms’ reactions to ground vibrations with an actual mole, a native species called Scalopus aquaticus. Again, the worms burst from the ground, but the mole was a seasoned professional. “He ate his weight in worms every day,” Martin told me.

The experiment proved what worm-grunting families had long known: Make the ground shudder and worms will appear, by the dozens or even the hundreds, as a response to predation. But by then, the worm-grunting industry in Sopchoppy had been on the decline for decades. The invention of the plastic lure in the 1970s meant that fewer fishermen shopped for live bait. Today, few people can scrape a living from full-time worm grunting.

“It’s a dying profession,” said Corey Benedict, a local musician who can trace his family history in Sopchoppy back several generations. Still, he says most locals grow up worm grunting for fun: “It’s just part of life. Instead of buying bait, it’s what you do. ... You get the worms before you hit the water.”

A few years ago, Benedict began making videos of his family and friends worm grunting and posting them to social media. To his surprise, the videos went viral, racking up millions of views on TikTok and Instagram. Benedict was translating comments from people all over the world, most of whom had never heard of worm grunting. The videos turned into an income stream for Benedict, bringing more attention to Sopchoppy. Soon, he was making more money creating worm-grunting content for social media than worm grunters were making selling their worms, he told me somewhat ruefully.

Legends of the trade

On the Saturday of the Worm Gruntin’ Festival, now in its 25th year, the Sopchoppy tradition appeared alive and well despite its commercial shortcomings. The sunny yard outside the Depot Museum sang with the sound of irons zipping back and forth over stobs and excited squeals when worms popped from the ground. Many festival attendees wore T-shirts depicting a Sopchoppy matriarch, Lossie Mae Rosier. Rosier, who died in 2011, raised 11 children on the money she earned from worm-grunting. In 2003, at 76, she was crowned Sopchoppy’s “Worm Queen.”

“She requested to be buried with her scepter and tiara, and she was,” Martin said. “Biggest funeral I’ve ever seen in Sopchoppy.” Martin made the crown and carved the scepter from a sparkleberry tree.

Inside the museum, Rosier’s daughter Gracie answered festivalgoers’ questions about the worm-grunting life, helped occasionally by two of her sisters and several other relatives who were milling about. Lossie Mae would go out to the forest before dawn and again at dusk, bringing her children who were old enough to help. In the evenings, they’d do their homework in the bait truck on the way out.

Rosier’s children would go worm grunting “anytime we needed spending money, so we wouldn’t be a burden, with so many of us,” Gracie explained. Her oldest sister had paid her tuition for Florida A&M University with her earnings from worm grunting.

Back outside, another Sopchoppy matriarch quietly presided over an informational booth. Audrey Revell, married to Gary for 54 years, stood among a display of press clippings about Sopchoppy worm grunting, many of them featuring the Revells, who are considered local legends for their long dedication to the craft. In addition to mentions in Scientific American and several Florida newspapers, the Revells have appeared on TV shows such as the Discovery Channel series “Dirty Jobs” and “CBS Mornings.” The couple no longer sells worms to bait shops, but locals often stop by their house to pick up fresh worms for fishing trips.

As I stood looking over the newspaper clippings, one headline caught my eye. “Two-Tailed Worm,” it read. I examined the yellowed article, which carried a photo of a 92-year-old man gazing open-mouthed at a worm with a forked tail. The story identified him as “Ol’ Man Ander Sanders,” who had made his living fishing and worm grunting around Sopchoppy. According to the article, in his long career, Sanders had never grunted up a two-tailed worm before.

“That’s my great-grandfather!” said a voice at my ear. I turned to see Eugene Sanders, a man with a twinkling smile and gray hairs escaping from under his hat. Like many Sopchoppy natives, Sanders didn’t need much prompting to talk about worm grunting. He reminisced happily about a week in June 2004 when he and his mother caught more than 135,000 worms over six days in Tate’s Hell State Forest. It was a record, he said.

Worm grunting is no longer his main source of income (Sanders and his family are commercial fishers), but it’s clear that the tradition still means as much to him—and to Sopchoppy legends like the Revells and the Rosiers—as it ever did.

“Not everybody can do [worm grunting], it ain’t no lie,” Sanders told me. “I’ll tell you my secret, everyone’s always asking.” He paused for effect. A couple other festivalgoers were listening now.

“I believe in prayer.”

When he kneels to grunt worms, Sanders said, he sends up a prayer. “Just being in the woods by myself, I feel closer to God.”

Stephanie Castellano | Read More

Stephanie Castellano is a freelance journalist based in Florida. Her work has appeared in Christian Science Monitor, Atlas Obscura and other outlets.