4) Euros don’t like to be disturbed – Anyone with a good memory of my “vermicomposting requirements” list will know that one of them is “peace and quiet”. This was added almost more as an afterthought (and as a bit of a joke), since I was focusing mostly on the requirements of Red Worms at the time (and they are actually pretty tolerant). In hindsight I’m glad I left it on the list because it is definitely applicable to European Nightcrawlers.
If you’ve ever given a Euro bin a good bump, or have started digging around vigorously, you likely know that this will almost always bring at least some of them (often the larger ones) to the surface – and some may even attempt to escape from the bin. It’s not too surprising, then, that they tend to be very restless after being shipped! My recommendation is add a really thick layer of dry, absorbent bedding over top of the worm habitat zone (not a bad idea in general) and/or keep the lid off and shine a bright light over top for a day or two to help them settle in.
All in all, this is definitely NOT something to worry too much about – just something to get used to if you’ve only ever worked with Reds. As a side-note, I want to point out that I’ve never witnessed a mass-exodus of these worms (such as can happen with Blue Worms), so I don’t actually consider them “flighty” or unpredictable.
And who knows – perhaps and advantage of this behavior is that you could use some sort of “grunting” technique for harvesting lots them at once!