“I found a bunch of these worms on a golf course green. Can you tell me what they are?” asks this reader, who sent in a lovely photograph of a tiny, segmented creature. The creature is black in color, with a long, tubular body, and looks like a millipede.

This frighteningly long worm was found by this woman who wonders if we could help identify it. The worm in question appears to be wrapped around some sort of concrete post, and sports a glossy, black body with darker stripes at regular intervals, with a reddish head at the end visible in the photograph.

A concerned reader wrote to us recently about a long, black worm he found in his house. He is worried that his dog has “a terrible worm of some kind.” We are of course highly sensitive to his concerns, but the reader makes no explicit connection between his dog and the long, black worm he found. He merely mentions that he came home (and presumably found the worm) and is worried about his dog. He didn’t mention any behavior of the dog that implies it has a worm infection, nor did he say he saw the worm come from the dog’s body. We are therefore slightly puzzled why he immediately linked the worm he found to his dog. In any case, he only asked us to identify the long, black worm, so hopefully in helping with this we can provide some guidance.