All About Worms

Recently, a reader wrote to us with one of the simplest questions we’ve ever received: what do pinworms (sometimes spelled “pin worms” – incorrectly) look like? To call this question simple is not to call it bad or insignificant – it’s important to know what pinworms look like if you suspect that you (or your child) have pinworms (they only afflict people), and in any case, we rather enjoy an easy question. Since the reader was exclusively interested in the appearance of pinworms, we’ll limit our remarks to this topic. If you would like to know more about these bothersome creatures in general, we encourage you to check out one of our previous articles about pinworms.

A reader asked where one might be able to purchase small, tropical aquatic worms. Presumably this would exclude the giant tube worm, which lives near undersea volcanic vents and can grow to over seven feet in length. However, for the buyer interested in purchasing tropical aquatic worms of the smaller variety, a number of options abound, including flatworms (phylum Platyhelminthes), roundworms (Nematoda), segmented or “fan” worms (Annelida), and arrow worms (Chaetognatha).

A reader found some very small white worms in his bathtub and would like to know what they are. While there are a couple of different possibilities, small, white, wormlike creatures found in the bathroom or kitchen are most often maggots (another possibility is that they are planarians, a type of flatworm, but these worms are usually aquatic so this seems unlikely unless the reader’s bathtub was full when he sent us his question).

A reader wrote to us recently about an infestation of worms plaguing his mountain home, so, not surprisingly, he wants to know how to remove worms from the house. The worms are coming through the ground floor of the home and end up in the bedrooms that are downstairs. How should he get rid of these worms?

A reader wrote to us about a fascinating discovery he recently made: when he split open a beef marrow bone – the type you might get from a butcher, which is where our reader got his bone – for his dogs to get at the marrow, he discovered that the bone was filled with hundreds, and perhaps even thousands, of tiny worms, or what appeared to be worms. The worms were inside the bone, burrowed into the bone marrow. Strangely, it appeared that the bone was completely sealed; in other words, it looked as though there was no way for anything to get into the bone. So, how on earth did an abundance of small worm-like creatures make there way into a bone, and what are these creatures anyway?