A reader reached out to us about some worm-like organisms she noticed around her home. The first one she found crawling on her blankets while she was changing her sheets. The second one she discovered on her carpet, and now she has noticed them in her bedroom. She does have cats, so she isn’t sure if the creatures could be related to the cats or not. Here is the picture she included:

The creature has a segmented body and 1 set of legs on each of its 3 most anterior segments. Its 2 most anterior segments are dark brown or black, and the remaining segments have a brown and white pattern on them. We are confident that our reader is dealing with snakefly larvae.

Snakeflies are a group of insects comprised of almost 300 different species. Unlike insects that mature quickly such as mosquitos and drain flies, the snakefly larval stage usually lasts for 2-3 years! Adults are known to be carnivorous and territorial, living in temperate coniferous forests around the world. We aren’t familiar with this specimen as a household pest, and some people even use snakeflies as pest control agents since they eat other insects that damage gardens and crops.

We don’t know what these larvae are doing in our reader’s home. Since they primarily eat insects, our reader might have another pest problem that she is unaware of that is attracting these larvae. Our best advice for our reader is to give her bedroom and house a thorough cleaning. Eliminating small particles will get rid of potential food sources and make her home less hospitable to small critters. In addition to cleaning, she can also seal up any small gaps and cracks around her doors, windows, and vents that might be serving as an entryway for these larvae. We hope our reader is able to say goodbye to these unwanted guests!

To conclude, we have identified the brown and white creature our reader found as a snakefly larva. We hope that cleaning up and keeping her doors and windows shut will help eradicate these specimens.

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