“I’ve been noticing these dried worm-like creatures around my wooden floor in my bedroom”, states this reader about the small, brown organism pictured below. “I find them every morning. They are always curled, dried, brownish-looking, and around 1 cm (0.4-inches). Can you please help me identify? Thank you.” From the pictures our reader included, we think she is finding dead earthworms around her bed. It is curious that she is finding these worms here. When earthworms come into people’s homes, they tend to come up through people’s drains, usually as a result of a leak in the drain pipes underground. However, how so many earthworms ended up in our reader’s bedroom is a bit of a mystery. All we can do in this case is guess.

One possibility is that the earthworms did come up through the drains, and there is a leak in the pipes. Signs of a leak include foul-smelling or strange-tasting water, discoloration of water, and inconsistent water pressure. If our reader is experiencing any of these, she may want to contact a professional to fix this leak. After they have crawled up through the drains, they are making their way into the bedroom because there is something organic that is decomposing there (perhaps a spilled piece of food that has not been cleaned up). To explain, earthworms feed on decomposing organic matter. However, if this was the case, our reader would likely notice the earthworms in her home before they had time to dry up and die (as that would definitely take a while at room temperature), and she would probably also smell whatever food she had spilled if it was a significant amount to attract so many worms.

Another possibility is that there is a crack in the flooring of her bedroom through which the earthworms are crawling, and then when they make it up, they get stuck there, dry out and die. Considering her floors are wooden, this is a possibility, though that would also infer that there were big enough cracks in the foundation of her house (assuming she is not in an apartment building) for these worms to crawl through. So, alternatively, perhaps the worms are coming in through an open window? But that would still not explain why they are staying in the bedroom to die.

In any case, we recommend that she check for these various possibilities and that she move these worms outside as soon as she finds them. When earthworms die, their bodies are decomposed by other earthworms, and thus their corpses, in a sense, attract the other worms to the sight of their death. As such, if our reader moves them outside, the earthworms should congregate there instead.

To conclude, we think that the dead worms our reader has been finding in her bedroom are earthworms. It is very strange that they are there, considering that the environment is much too dry for them, hence their dying. We hope this helps and we wish our reader the very best!

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