A reader writes to ask whether glowing green nightcrawlers are safe for turtles to eat. We’ve written previously about glowing green nightcrawlers, also known as glowworms, but this reader’s specific query, which we can surmise relates to a desire to expand a beloved pet turtle’s palate, has not been previously addressed. To that end, we’ve prepared a refresher on the nature of growing green nightcrawlers, as well as their suitability for animal consumption (we assume the possibility of human glowworm consumption is not of widespread interest). As you’ll see, some glowworms can probably be fed to pets and some cannot.

A reader asks, “How do you get heart worms in the human heart?” Naturally, we at All About Worms are not medical professionals of any kind and our statements should in no circumstances be taken to constitute medical advice, but we do believe we possess a set of knowledge items germane to this reader’s concern. The reader asks specifically about those types of worms, if any, which may invade the human heart, a concern which is understandable both because of its obvious consequences for human health and due to the fact that popular accounts of heartworm tend to center on its occurrence in dogs and other animal hosts.

We recently received five photos from a reader containing images of different caterpillars, this is a fir tussock.

The pin worm belongs to the family Oxyuridae, order Oxyuroidea, and the phylum Nematoda. Pin worms are classified as Enterobius vermicularis. Threadworms are also classified as Enterobius vermicularis. Pin worms are also called “seatworms” and they have several spellings, including “pinworm” and “pinworms.”

A frustrated reader wrote to us a while ago about tiny, red worms that he has been finding in his kitchen and bathroom. According to the reader, the worms are actually “redish” (reddish, presumably), approximately the color of rust. The tiny, red worms do not have any legs, and they don’t appear to have hair either. The reader finds the worms when he is sweeping – they crawl out of the piles of dirt that accumulate. The reader insists that no one knows what they are, and that no website dedicated to worms and larvae (including All About Worms) has any information about the worms in his bathroom and kitchen. What are the tiny, red worms he is finding?

The wooly bear worm is most famous for its legendary ability to predict winter weather. Also known as wooly worm, woolly worm, black-ended bear, fuzzy bear, or banded wooly bear, the wooly bear worm is actually the caterpillar (larval stage) of the Isabella Tiger Moth.

Worm tea sounds like a disgusting beverage, not exactly the sort of drink you want to curl up with on a cold night (or any night for that matter.) Fortunately, it’s not a drink that people enjoy…it’s used primarily as a fertilizer!

One of our readers reached out about a worm coming out of her nose. We aren’t able to diagnose medical issues, but we have given a brief overview of roundworms, which are parasitic worms that can emerge from their host’s nose. We encourage our reader to visit a doctor ASAP!

According to the Cornell Waste Management Institute of the famed Cornell University, worms do not bite. In fact, in nature wax worms do not feed on anything but pollen, honey, cocoons, and beeswax. Wax worm breeders have no problems feeding their inventory of wax worms without the help of pollen and cocoons. These squirmy little creatures can also survive off of an artificial diet of a mixture of dog food, water, and honey or a mixture of Gerber’s mixed cereal, glycerin, honey, and water.

Grub worms feed on plants and the roots of turf grasses and the adult beetles feed on trees, shrubs, and other foliage. While grub worms are harmless to humans, they can be devastating to crops mainly because they feed on crop roots.

A reader asked us through the All About Worms Facebook page about “white worms with yellow bottoms [that are] eating my Dogwood trees.” These white worms with yellow bottoms are very likely white larvae with yellow bottoms, so we’ll adjust our usage accordingly. The reader asked us for an identification, and we’ll largely limit ourselves to this specific matter to keep things short and simple.

We received a question through the All About Worms Facebook page about red and orange caterpillars that a reader recently found on an apple tree. To call them “red and orange caterpillars” is at once insufficient and overreaching. It is insufficient because the creatures aren’t only red and orange; they have black heads and legs, and some orange parts of their bodies might just as easily be described as yellow. White hairs also cover their bodies, and they are striped lengthwise, from head to tail. We overreach, however, in claiming without explanation that these creatures are caterpillars. The reader identifies them as worms, so we must explain why we think they are instead caterpillars. This explanation is of course tied to the matter of identification, which is what the reader is wondering about, and to that topic we now turn.

Worms prefer complete darkness because the light affects them in the worst way. Light does not kill worms, but if worms spend too much time in the light (typically one hour), they become paralyzed.

This reader “would be extremely grateful” if we could help her identify some parasites that have invaded her family. Our reader writes to us in the hopes that the answers that we provide may “hopefully prevent others from experiencing a terror” such as the one our reader has faced.

A little while ago a reader wrote to us about some white worms with a green spot that “appeared out of nowhere” in his basement. The reader got rid of many of the worms in the basement by taking them outside, but when he got back there were even more worms than there were before. The reader said the creatures in the basement looked like inchworms, but he didn’t seem very confident in this suggestion. He also mentioned that it was raining out when he made his discovery, and thought this might have something to do with the worms’ sudden appearance in the basement. What might the white worms with green spots in our reader’s basement be?

What is a night crawler? This is the basic question we are concerned with, and the answer is straightforward: a night crawler (also written as “nightcrawler”) is simply an earthworm, an extremely common worm we have written about dozens of times. After a brief refresher on exactly what earthworms are, we’ll explain why they are called “night crawlers” (or, again, “nightcrawlers”), and also list some of the other names that earthworms go by. Thus, our treatment of night crawlers and earthworms will be more linguistic than biological.

We received a long, detailed, and disconcerting email from a reader about a week ago. We aren’t sure how to address it, and internal deliberations took place about possible approaches we could take to this reader’s email and question. Actually, the reader didn’t ask a question, but instead listed several extreme medical problems she has experienced over the last six years following an intestinal worm diagnosis. The worm that infected her intestines has been one of only many concerns, as she has experienced several disturbing problems. It’s not clear if all of these problems are truly physical, or if some of them may be emotional, or whether they are related to the intestinal worm infection, and in any case we can’t comment on any of this because we aren’t medical professionals. Nothing we say should be construed as medical advice, and in fact we won’t say much at all. Rather, we will let our reader’s email speak for itself. Perhaps readers have had worm problems, or at least what are experienced as worm problems, that compare to our reader’s issues over the last six years.

One of our readers discovered a small larvae in his home. We think this might be a mealworm, but we aren’t totally sure.

A reader wrote to us a while back about an interesting red worm that he found. He took a picture of the creature (see below), which shows a relatively small red worm in what appears to be an arid environment. The picture captures the red worm mid-movement, showing the middle of the worm’s body raised in an arc, which led the reader to suspect that he found an inchworm (commonly spelled as two separate words – “inch worm” – and also called a “measuring worm”). We have no reason to doubt this hypothesis, so below we provide some basic information about inch worms, although for reasons that we explain we aren’t sure exactly what the red inchworm our reader found is.

“I’ve been de-mothing my bedroom recently, and found a few of these”, writes this reader in Colorado about the thin, brown-striped, worm-like creature pictured below. “While they bear a passing resemblance to carpet beetle larvae, they don’t appear to match up exactly (I am, however, not the expert here). I’ve included both pictures of a dead one and video of a live one moving. If helpful, I live in the Rocky Mountain area.” First off, we want to say that we agree that this does look like a carpet beetle larva, and we do think that is what it is. The reason why it might not match up exactly with our reader’s idea of a carpet beetle larva is because there are actually multiple species of carpet beetles, all of which look slightly different from one another.