I guess this older thread has come back to life.
I’m skeptical that introduced earthworms are actually detrimental to forest ecosystems. Sure, there’s been research that claims non-native worms are damaging our forests, but there’s a profound bias in environmental sciences towards viewing any change as bad and towards viewing pre-European contact North America as some kind of happy Arcadia. So they say earthworms are bad for our forests, and yet, North American forests evolved with earth worms. Every species supposedly harmed by earthworms coexisted with earthworms for their entire evolutionary history up until a very brief, geologically and evolutionarily speaking, ten thousand year lull.
Yes, earthworms significantly altered the mulch layer and that seriously changed the proportion of various species, but that change was a return to the normal state, not a change to something new and degraded. The normal, natural state that all North American species are adapted to isn’t the pre-European contact state, it’s the pre-Ice Age and indigenous American arrival state. And in that state, the environment of North America had earthworms. And a lot of other things that are gone. The pre-European contact ecology was already a deeply degraded, utterly decimated ecology.
Anyway, rant over. I’ve no idea if these snake worms, as a genus or family, were present beforehand but they certainly sound like they’re causing issues and might be a net negative (unlike earthworms).