“Does anyone know what these brown rice-shaped casings are?” is all this reader asks in her submission regarding the ovate object pictured below. Well, to start with, we want to commend our reader on the excellent photo she has taken: it truly makes things easier when we try to identify the organisms our readers are asking about. When it comes to this particular organism, or potential “casing”, we would say this looks like a pupa. The pupal stage is the third one in an insect’s life cycle: the first being the egg stage, the second being the larval stage, and the third and final being the adult stage (when they have matured into a fully-formed insect, like a moth or a fly).

Despite being immobile, it is at the pupal stage that the organism expends most of its energy, because it is at this stage that the insect undergoes metamorphosis, the process of transforming from the larva into the insect. This is why larvae are such voracious eaters, because they need to build up the energy for this very stage. The “casing” is thus the chrysalis: the hard shell that they form around them during the pupal stage to protect themselves from predators and from falling. So, in short, our reader really needs not worry about these.

Of course, we do not know how many our reader found in her home, so if there are enough to trigger concerns about an infestation, then she should worry in terms of getting the pupae out of her home before they transform and a bunch of flies, butterflies, or whatever these insects may be start swarming her home. But since they are completely immobile at this stage, it should be no problem for our reader to scoop these up onto a dustpan and move them outside. Now, if our reader is curious about what species of insect these are, she can keep a couple of the pupa, put them in a container with air holes, and see what they turn into.

With all of that said, we suppose there is also a possibility that these are just casings: there are insect larvae that shed their skin when they molt to their next size, such as carpet beetle larvae. But we are still inclined to say that these look more like pupae than shed skin casings. If they were casings, we would think they would be more on the transparent side, while these are a solid brown.

To conclude, we think that the small, brown “casings” our reader found are actually insect pupae. We hope the information in this article proves helpful, and we wish her the very best!