ABV as vermiculture input

[chappie]

Just curious if anyone had anything good or bad to say about using ABV (already been vaped) cannabis material as worm food. Seems to me after some bacterial back-n-forth it would be ideal, being composed of exactly the material cannabis is made of albeit roasted (not burned).

I've been recycling my green vegetative cannabis via compost for some time, but it only occurred to me today to intentionally save my ABV.

 

[InjectTruth]

sure you can, but you can also just as easily make some edibles with it. Its not full power anymore but there are goods left over. Toss it in your next batch with the rest of the goods you plan to use, but damn feedin it to worms is a bit wasteful.

 

[exploziv]

I compost mine and it works great! already chopped so faster to be composted.

 

[canna woop!]

Have you tried using It to make edibles?

 

[hempfield]

I got mine blended with some wormcastings tea (to speed up the breaking process) and then added to the worm bin together with some pure made from germinated cannabis (industrial cannabis) seeds .

 

[exploziv]

I make my edibles using popcorn buds, no need for toasted tasted in my butter.

 

[chappie]

I don't do a ton of edibles, and yeah I get plenty of popcorn bud and trim... some I run as bubble hash and some I run as cannabutter. My ABV adds up slowly, and I generally toss it, have not felt the need to eke every bit of psychoactivity out of it. Mostly I was curious if anyone had theorizes on using cannabis inputs to grow cannabis. Creeps us out in a cannabalistic sense, but makes huge sense in terms of matter exchange.

 

[The Dragon]

The real question here is "do worms have cannabinoid receptors?" which are the things that substances such as THC bind to in order to be taken up by the body and produce some kind of effect. Pretty much every vertebrate has these receptors, but fewer invertebrates do, it seems (there isn't a ton of research that's been done, I don't think). I was able to find one study on invertebrate cannabinoid receptors that said that Lumbricus terrestris (the Canadian Nightcrawler) did indeed have "specific binding" sites, which suggests their nervous system would be effected by exposure to THC. This suggests that Eisenia fetida or any of the other earthworms we use for composting could very well have similar specific binding sites (despite not having a brain or much of an immune system, which is generally where vertebrate cannabinoid receptors lie) though I couldn't find a specific study looking at this. I did see that a hypothesis was made that "cannabinoid receptors evolved in the last common ancestor of bilaterians". Bilaterans are creatures that have bilateral symmetry, (creatures with a front and back as well as a top and bottom) and earthworms are in that category, so if that's true I think any earthworm should have cannabinoid bonding sites in their nervous system.

What specific effects it would have is another question, but it seems a safe bet that it would have do the same sorts of things it does in other creatures. However, keep in mind that since the nervous system of worms is vastly different from that of humans, and even other vertebrates like mice, the specific effects may similarly differ. Also, seeing as how cannabinoids are normally not lethal to any creature in reasonable amounts, that doesn't seem like it would be a concern either.

(The study I found was from the Journal of Evolutionary Biology. You can read the abstract here. There is another meta-study but I think it's info on worms is taken from this other article.)

--copied directly from http://vermicomposters.ning.com/forum/topics/effects-of-marijuana-on-worms