One of our readers recently contacted us about some specimens he noticed in his bean-to-cup coffee machine. The creatures were…

A reader wrote to us recently about a worm-like creature “squirming in my coffee carafe while rinsing with water.” The reader was alarmed by this because she is “truly phobic about worms,” and she also reports that she thinks what she found is a millipede. For reasons we will come to shortly, she might have actually found a centipede, but in truth she wasn’t particularly concerned about what she found. She was more fixated on where the centipede (or millipede) came from, and she also wanted to know if there could be more and how she should eliminate them. We’ll try out best to identify and address all her concerns below.