Heartbroken :(

Today I made the sad, sad discovery that my red wiggler worms have all died. Rather I think that they may have been murdered. :( First a little history...

I got these worms while attending the La Leche League International Conference in DC (yeah, I know what do worms have to do with breastfeeding??) One of the sessions I went to was for vermicomposting (using worms inside your house to compost) and the woman who did the session said that if anyone wanted to take worms home, they could take some of hers. So me and another guy split the worms (here we were in his hotel room, with a pile of worms separating the dirt from the worms and then dividing them into two piles, while his little 2 year old helped us). So I bring home a baggie of worms and set up my worm bin.

Last year I decided to bring them into my classroom to use with the students talking about the ecology and recycling and life cycles and such. The kids loved them (okay, not all the kids loved them), they would ask, "can we see the worms??" and I would open the bin and they would hold the worms and watch all wiggle around. It was really fun. Towards the end of the year, I had a day when we separated the finished compost from the worms and we were amazed at how many worms we had - it was incredible. It was a great day, for many reasons. :) I offered some worms to any family that wanted to take some home, but only one family decided to try it. Over the summer the worms did really well, considering they were largely neglected although I was still able to toss some scraps into the bin every few weeks.

Fast forward to now: Last week or so, I noticed that there was a lot of liquid in the bottom of the bin (I had two bins nested inside each other with small drain holes in the bottom of the top one), which was odd, but I figured I would dump the excess when I checked on the worms in a day or so. So today, I took the bin outside to air it out (it does get a lot of fruit flies inside the bin) and noticed that there didn't seem to be any worms around the top and there was an apple that was rotting without a worm in site. Huh?? Usually, if there was banana skin or a big chunk of apple, the outside skin would remain for a while and the worms would be swarming inside the fruit (actually it was pretty cool, when you would peel back a banana skin and it was totally packed with worms - like something out of a horror movie - in a good way). Then I dug around in the compost and couldn't find ANY worms - where the hell did they all go??? So I picked up the top bin and checked the liquid in the bottom bin and noticed that there were tons of worms slooshing around in the liquid and they didn't look good. Well, maybe if they got out of the water, they would be okay??? So I dumped them back into the bin, but they were all dead. We are talking hundreds -thousands of worms all dead.

I cannot for the life of me figure out what could have happened to the worms. It seems like it must have been recently because they weren't completely decomposed. These are some possibilities:

• I put something in that had too much pesticide on it? No, because they survived this long and I didn't put anything unusual in it, besides if it were that I think that they would have just died in the main bin and not gone down through the drain holes. (In the past I've found maybe 1-2 worms EVER in the drain bin).
  
• It was too cold in the room over the break? No, because they survived last year when our classroom temp was regularly 55 degrees - this room is warmer than that and we haven't had a terribly cold spell AT ALL anyway.
  
• They didn't have enough food? No, because there was food in there that was decomposing.
  
• One of the kids poured something in the top vent into the bin? No, because I would have noticed it and also the only thing they could have poured would have been juice or water, which wouldn't have really hurt the worms.
  
• Someone added some liquid that was not friendly - cleaner? windex? something toxic to worms.? This is the most possible solution because there was something that made the worms try to get away from their compost-home by going into the drainage bin and there was a lot of extra liquid in the bottom bin. But this also just doesn't make sense because I can't imagine who would have done it? Someone who didn't like worms? Someone who just didn't like me? Of course, that's possible, but a lot of people didn't even really know about the worms.
  

I'm just so baffled and sad. I'll now need to decide if I should try and get some more worms and start over. It won't be the same, these were special worms, I had a special attachment to (I know I sound like a freak - there must be something wrong with me to be this upset over worms).