“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.

A reader wrote to us a while back about an interesting red worm that he found. He took a picture of the creature (see below), which shows a relatively small red worm in what appears to be an arid environment. The picture captures the red worm mid-movement, showing the middle of the worm’s body raised in an arc, which led the reader to suspect that he found an inchworm (commonly spelled as two separate words – “inch worm” – and also called a “measuring worm”). We have no reason to doubt this hypothesis, so below we provide some basic information about inch worms, although for reasons that we explain we aren’t sure exactly what the red inchworm our reader found is.