We received a puzzling question recently about some worms that our reader found in the hair of her cat. The worms (or whatever they are) have been caught in the cat’s hair on a couple of different occasions, and the reader is concerned that they might be harmful to her cat in one way or another. They might just be getting caught in the cat’s fur, posing no threat, but they also might be “something worse feeding off him [the cat].” The reader offers a lot of information and a picture, so we’ll try to make some sense of the situation with what we were presented with.

A couple of days ago a reader found some small black and brown larvae on the blanket her cats sleeps on. The cats’ blanket (and therefore the larvae) is lying on a hardwood floor in an undisturbed corner that hasn’t been cleaned for a while. The larvae appear to be limited to this corner, and they aren’t found anywhere else the cats go in the house. The reader was wondering what the black and brown larvae are, and specifically indicated that they might be carpet beetle larvae.