“I found this tiny, skinny little thing on my shorts after coming home from a run,” says this reader, who asks if we can identify the worm-like creature. Although it is difficult to tell from the photograph, which was taken at a distance from the worm, the creature appears to be a dark color (perhaps a black or dark brown), with a thin, elongated body.

“The tiny thread-thin worm taped to the card […] was crawling, inch-worm-like on my bed comforter one night” says this reader, perfectly encapsulating her experience with the worm in the photo below. The “inch-worm-like” creature in the photo is a brownish-red color, is lying on its side in a shape that inchworms do make when they make their way across a surface, and is, from what we can tell, quite small in size.

We received a question through the All About Worms Facebook page about red and orange caterpillars that a reader recently found on an apple tree. To call them “red and orange caterpillars” is at once insufficient and overreaching. It is insufficient because the creatures aren’t only red and orange; they have black heads and legs, and some orange parts of their bodies might just as easily be described as yellow. White hairs also cover their bodies, and they are striped lengthwise, from head to tail. We overreach, however, in claiming without explanation that these creatures are caterpillars. The reader identifies them as worms, so we must explain why we think they are instead caterpillars. This explanation is of course tied to the matter of identification, which is what the reader is wondering about, and to that topic we now turn.

A few days ago we received a question from a reader who sent us a picture of what appears to be a red caterpillar with eyes. (Just a few days ago, we answered a question about a yellow worm with eyes, and the “worm” in question was in fact a caterpillar, so evidently people are seeing lots of caterpillars with eyes recently.) Along with the picture, the reader asked one question (slightly edited for clarity): “What kind of animal is in the photo?” Presumably, he is wondering what the red caterpillar with eyes is, so we will limit ourselves to the matter of identification.

A little while back, a reader wrote to us about a strange, spiky creature he found in his greenhouse. The creature was about four inches (10 centimeters) long, and it had a red head with spikes on it. (It was “spikey,” to use the common misspelling.) The creature also had pincers near its mouth and three pairs of legs on the front portion of its body. The reader only ever refers to what he found as a “creature,” indicating that he doesn’t know what it is (which of course he wants to know), and he also asked if he should be concerned about planting vegetables again in his gardening operation in light of the creature he found. The reader did not send a picture, making a difficult question even harder to answer, but we are all but certain he found some sort of caterpillar. So, the question before us is: what kind of grey caterpillar with a spiky, red head did our reader find, and is harmful to his garden?