There wasn’t much chance that I would be awake to see the total eclipse of the blood worm moonpaijoga, which was visible late last Thursday night or early Friday morning, depending on the time zone. In Nashville the eclipse reached totality at 1:25 a.m., an hour I have not willingly seen since the last time there was a newborn baby in this house.

“A third of the bacteria and slightly more of the fungi can be considered potential human pathogens,” said Xavier Rodó, a computational ecologist at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, who led the work.

Besides, storms were on the way. When I stepped outside after supper to see whether setting my alarm made any sense, all I could see of the worm moon was a tiny, lighted patch of sky flashing through a gap between hurrying clouds.

A blood moon lunar eclipse happens when Earth lines up between the sun and the moon, casting a shadow that tints the moon red. During years when March is not offering a total lunar eclipse, the full moon is known as the worm moon. The nicknames for moons — the wolf moon in January,66br the snow moon in February, etc.— are derived from Native American tradition.

The names varied from tribe to tribe, and European settlers added their own variations, but generally these names represent a natural phenomenon that once tended to occur during that month. According to The Old Farmer’s Almanac, which has compiled the full moons’ names and the reasons for them, the worm moon is traditionally a time when earthworms reappear as the soil begins to thaw or — in another telling — when beetle larvae begin to emerge from tree bark.

Many Americans, probably most Americans, are now so divorced from their ecosystems that they have no idea what happens to earthworms during the cold months and even less idea how beetle larvae behave. Continuing to call March’s full moon the worm moon is like calling a shopping center 100 Oaks because it was built in a place that was heavily wooded before someone decided to build a mall there.

Very little on Earth still resembles the planet as it was when the first peoples were naming the full moons. Maybe that’s why I’m in love with these names. I love the way they persist despite our culture’s aversion, if not outright hostility, to the inconvenient natural world. I am always looking for signs of what can yet be preserved. I am especially looking for the people who are working to preserve them.

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