“I am finding these dead, dried worms on the pavement and on the exterior wall of my home”, writes this reader about the black, worm-like creature pictured below. “They range in size from 1/2” to 1 ½” long. I live in southeast Florida.” Right off the bat, we will have to say that we will not be able to identify this worm accurately, and that is because when a worm has dried out to this extent, their bodies look little to nothing like they did when they were alive: their coloration, size and shape changes completely. All we can do is give our reader some advice on how to keep worms away from his house.

“I didn’t get a picture, but I can describe something I found under some dirty blankets my cat decided to sleep on”, writes this reader in her submission. “I live in northwest Indiana. Bandit is an indoor-only cat, he gets Revolution monthly, and has tested negative for parasites. When I picked up the blankets, there were three off-white, about two or three inches long, very brittle, long, spiral-shaped (like a spiral staircase) objects. Not moving, did not see any head, or other features. Picked up with gloves and they fragmented instantly. Very regular spiral shape, all exactly the same. Any ideas what that may have been? Not even sure if they were worms. Thanks.”

We received an extremely short email from a reader the other day about a black bug that looks like a worm and falls apart when it is dried out or dead. The bug also has a thick body, and it was found in Naples, Florida. The reader’s question – or technically sentence fragment – seemed to concern identification, so we’ll try to make some sense of her message, such as it is, and offer a couple of remarks about what she might have found.

A reader wrote to us on the All About Worms Facebook page about the prospect of reviving a dried-out worm with water. If gotten to soon enough, she asked, could a worm that is rapidly drying out on the sidewalk be resuscitated with water? More precisely, she asked about “red inch garden worms,” which we take to mean some type of inchworm, so she is technically asking about reviving dried-out caterpillars with water, not worms (because inchworms, being the larval form of geometer moths, are caterpillars). This actually changes things a bit, as caterpillars aren’t as susceptible to drying out as worms, but we’ll address both issues at once. So, the whole question before us is: can you revive worms or caterpillars that are dried-out with water?