“…Moreover, during their activity, anecic earthworms often create middens at the entrance of their burrows (Bouché, 1977;Brown et al, 2000) which are a surface structure made up of a mix of soil, casts, mucus and buried organic matter fragments (Nielsen and Hole, 1964). Within anecic earthworms, several studies have highlighted two ecological sub-categories according to earthworm morphological traits (Briones and Álvarez-Otero, 2018), burrowing (Jégou et al, 2000(Jégou et al, , 2001Bastardie et al, 2005) and feeding behaviors (Ferrière, 1980;Eisenhauer et al, 2008;Andriuzzi et al, 2016;Larsen et al, 2016;Hoeffner et al, 2018). Thus, epi-anecic earthworms preferentially consume fresh leaf litter at the soil surface which is then buried into the soil profile whereas strictanecic earthworms consume a mix of leaf litter and humified organic matter within the soil profile (Cortez et al, 1989;Jégou et al, 1998;Stromberger et al, 2012;Larsen et al, 2016;Hoeffner et al, 2018).…”