We recently received a question from a reader about a “dog food bin [that] was attacked by worms.” The reader’s mom reported the scenario, and he (our reader) was apparently skeptical at first, but he seems to have confirmed the presence of the worms, which he described as “black on top with a white and brown stripe the length of the worm.” The worms are two inches (five centimeters) long, and they were found on a farm in Pennsylvania. The reader and his mom have never seen anything like the worms before, and they were wondering what they might have found.

Regrettably, the reader doesn’t have a picture of the worms, and obviously that makes identifying them much harder. Moreover, based on the physical description of the worms, no obvious possibilities come to mind. We have actually written about worms and pet food on a few different occasions, and in all these instances we suspected that our readers had found some sort of larvae. We wrote about small “worms” with stripes in cat food and small, dark worms in and around cat food, for example, and in both of these cases, the alleged worms were actually larvae. More precisely, we thought our readers might be dealing with carpet beetle larvae or flour beetle larvae, which are both candidates to be found in pet food, but neither one of these creatures matches the description of what our reader found.

One worm we know of, and it is actually a worm according to our definition, that has stripes that run the length of its body is the hammerworm worm. There are a number of different hammerhead worm species, and together they make up the genus Bipalium. The different species have different colored stripes, and thus one of them might match the exact pattern described by our reader, although we haven’t been able to find such a match. As far as we know, there isn’t any specific connection between hammerhead worms and dogs, and since hammerhead worms are carnivorous, feeding on earthworms, we don’t know why they would be “attacking” a bin filled with dog food. By chance, though, hammerhead worms have come up in connection with dogs at least one other time. In this situation, it wasn’t clear if there was in fact any connection between the dog and the hammerhead worm, but now that we look back at that article, it appears possible that the dog threw up a hammerhead worm, and in which case perhaps the worm was in the dog’s food. If so, our reader might have some reason for thinking he found hammerhead worms in his mother’s dog food bin.

Obviously, though, this link between hammerhead worms and dogs is fairly tenuous, so we definitely aren’t suggesting with any degree of confidence that our reader found hammerhead worms. However, it is about the best suggestion we can come up with, and so this possibility is probably worth looking into.

Summary

Article Name

AAW - Worms in Dog Food Bin

Description

We recently received a question from a reader about a "dog food bin [that] was attacked by worms."