“I was blowing debris by the front door and I blew some pink stuff I thought was fungus from one crack, then when I was about to blow more of it from the other side of the porch, I noticed they were moving”, writes this reader in her submission regarding the mass of red worms pictured below. “There were hundreds of these worms in piles. If they are earth worms, which we do have around here, I will leave them be since they are good for the soil, despite the fact that I am very grossed out by this strange phenomenon and I would prefer they not be on our porch. If they are something invasive or going to turn into bugs, I would like to eradicate them. We have a lot of frogs and toads around so maybe they will take care of it for me tonight. I live in the Central Florida area. Thanks in advance.”

“This was found in our toilet bowl on its own”, writes this reader about the red-striped worm pictured below. “Do you know if it’s a parasite? Thank you for your website. It’s a really useful website and very informative. Thanks!” To that we want to thank our reader for the compliment, and for coming to us to have this worm identified. And with that in mind, we think our reader has found herself a tiger worm, albeit a mangled one. Like most worm species, tiger worms typically have a uniform shape to their bodies, and we can see how this worm’s body is very irregular. How we were able to tell that this is a tiger worm is by the parts of its body that are still intact. The stripes, coloration, and shape of those parts indicate that this is a tiger worm.

“We have found these worms underneath the pavers around our pool”, writes this reader about the red worms covered in sand pictured below. “Do you know if they are blood worms? Also how do we get rid of them? They seem to be pushing moist dirt up through the pavers. Thanks!” Given the color of the worms and the location they were found, we would say it is likely that these are bloodworms. We cannot say this with 100% certainty, as we cannot really see the physical characteristics of the worms, seeing as they are covered in sand. But assuming these are bloodworms, we will do our best to give our reader the information she asks for.

“Is it a blood worm?” asks Almohannad about the bright red, worm-like creature pictured below. He also sends in an excellent video of the “worm [he] found in [his] toilet.” He does not provide more context than this, but based on the photo and the little context he did provide, we would say this likely is a blood worm. The term “blood worm” does not refer to any one species of worm, but is actually an umbrella term for those worm-like organisms which have a bright red color due to the excess amount of hemoglobin they produce, which enables them to sustain for long periods of time in low-oxygen conditions: like underwater. In fact, a lot of blood worm species are marine worms.

“I found these in my horse trough”, writes Karen about the red worm-like critters pictured below. “They seem to have ‘casings’ of some sort that seem to be ‘absorbed’ by the plastic/rubber trough itself. There are strange “scratch lines” on the side of the trough, and these lines I have noticed elsewhere in my barn. Is it a pinworm? Can pinworms be transmitted through different types of materials? Please, tell me everything. I am in Stafford, Virginia, and these worms were in water. It is October, and the weather has been pleasant. There was recently a huge amount of rain with Hurricane Ian. Can these worms get into wood? Is this the larval stage of something else? Thank you!”

“Does anyone know what this is?” is all this reader asks about the strange, lobster-shaped organism pictured below. We have never seen anything like it, and it is not particularly worm-like in appearance: this, in conjunction with the lack of context, makes it impossible for us to identify this creature. We also do not know what concerns we could address, since our reader did not make any known to us. For that reason, we will simply do a quick overview of some information that may prove helpful.

“I am seeking insight into how common it is for fish to encounter earthworms and/or aquatic worms”, states this reader in his submission. “I am aware that fish use a keen sense of smell to find food and are often triggered by movement to prey on organisms.

“What is this worm?!” asks this reader in the UK about the red-striped worm-like creature pictured below. “Hoping it’s not a harmful parasite.”

“This is the second one I have found in our mobile home”, states this reader in Belding, Michigan. She is referring to the minuscule, red worm-like organism pictured below, and wants to know how they are getting into her home.

“Is this an earthworm that I found in my toilet?” is all this reader writes in his submission. The “earthworm” he is referring to is the long, red-striped worm in the photo below, which is a screenshot from one of the two videos our reader sent in.

“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.

“Very thin, little red worms” have been coming from this woman’s tap in La Union, the Philippines. She asks that we help identify the critters and provide insight on how to get rid of them completely.

A worm was found in the toilet of this reader, alive, and she wonders if we could help identify it for her as she is “freaked” out. The worm in question appears to be red in color, with segmented stripes, and a long, smooth body.

Red, “free-moving, thread-like” worms of varying lengths were discovered in the bathroom of this concerned woman. She says they look “dangerous and unpredictable” given their speed, and worries that they might be parasitic to humans.

A “red, string-like” worm was found in the bathroom sink of this woman in East Texas. According to our “horrified” reader, the worm was “wiggling out of the overflow”, and she has never seen anything like it before.

One of our readers emailed us inquiring about adding Miracle-Gro peat moss to some of the red fishing worms he had recently purchased. He wanted to know if they would grow and reproduce.

We recently received a question through the All About Worms Facebook page about “two red worms in the toilet bowl.” The worms were “10 cm long, thin, like one millimeter in diameter, and alive, even in the water, they were still moving.” The reader didn’t actually ask for an identification, but instead asked if the worms might be parasites. This is his main concern, and we will focus on this question, although the answer is of course tied to what exactly the reader found, so we’ll touch on the matter of identification as well. What might the red worm in the toilet be, and are they parasitic?

A reader wrote to us recently to ask about two worms she found in her kitchen. The worms have red bodies and tan heads, and they are perhaps a half an inch (one centimeter) long. The reader isn’t particularly concerned with what they are, and is instead focused on the question of where they came from. She has no indoor houseplants, and her windows and doors have been closed. She also says she has no food, but it is hard to take this literally, so perhaps she just doesn’t have food that is laying around the kitchen. As the reader points out, though, these two worms must of come from somewhere, and where might that be?

A red worm was found by a reader in Northern Germany – or perhaps we should say ein roter Wurm wurde von einem Leser in Norddeutschland gefunden – and he wrote to us to see if we might be able to identify it. The worm was found in a garden, where it was mostly underground, and it is not exactly red. Its overall body is more like a pinkish color, but the bottom of the worm’s body is almost white. More precisely, the color of the worm fades as you move down its body – the top is a red or dark pink color, the middle is a light pink, and then the bottom is almost entirely white. What might our reader have found?

We received a question from a reader recently who has been finding red worms in his sink drain. The reader describes his situation well, so we’ll quote (with a few minor edits) his entire email, after which we’ll get on to the task of identifying the worms in the drain: “These worms keep entering through the sink hole of my bathroom. I just pour water and wash them down the drain again. But still they manage to come up again. They crawl really slowly and they move away from the sink hole. I am scared that they might be harmful because their color is very red…..like blood sucking parasites! Please help. Let me know what these are and how you can get rid of them. Even if they aren’t harmful, I’ll be happy not to see them again.”