Awww! What an amazing thing to share with your child, I so happy for you! In the study they removed the cocoons from the growing medium and put them in a container covered with distilled water. You could do that for your 5-year old maybe if you rinse them with distilled water about 77 degrees and put them in a clear tupperware perforated lid container, covering the cocoons maybe with a saturated distilled water paper towel. Hopefully they'd make it and they could be observed hatching by him using the color as a guide and I think it said the baby wormies are visible and red through the cocoon when they are ready to break out. Reminds me of being a kid germinating bean seeds in petri dishes that Dad had laying around :-)

If you don't have a reverse osmosis purifier in your house, you can buy a gallon of distilled water at Walmart for about 85 cents - store brand is pink cap in the water aisle.

Cheers

PC

I don't think it's necessary for the water to be distilled - the researchers writing that paper used distilled water just because that's good scientific practice, to avoid any unknown factors in the water that might influence the experiment - but plain old tap water is fine for worms.

I think I have seen a cocoon hatching one time, just by chance - the baby worm coming out is incredibly small and basically clear. If you wanted to try and watch it happen, a magnifying glass would help a lot. But I don't know how to make sure you can catch it happening without a laboratory staff checking around the clock...

I have tried to let all the cocoons "hatch out" from finished vermicompost before. After picking out all the worms I reasonably could by hand, I left the VC in a bucket, came back after about three weeks and picked out all the baby worms (pro tip: baby worms are harder to pick out because they are so tiny). Then I came back after three more weeks and picked again. Next time I looked - still more baby worms. I finally gave up on making completely worm-free VC, but you can get pretty close if you have a lot of patience for worm-picking and no particular need to use the VC for a while.

Good point theparsley about the water. I don't have any experience, so I defer to you guys. If it were me, I would use distilled water because the worm babies are so tiny and the chlorine in tap is something I really was unsure about, and the type of chlorination too. The chlorine hurts my tomato seedlings and nearly killed my strawberry starts once, but those are seedling plants and these are embryo animals.

There are easier solutions, either bottled water which generally is not chlorinated, or just put an empty glass out in the rain and use that. Nature's best!

Cheers

PC