Tag: swimming pool
Horsehair Worms in the Swimming Pool
A reader from Ojai, California wrote to us recently about a long worm found in his swimming pool. Relative to its width, the worm is actually extremely long, and in fact you would have trouble identifying it as any sort of living creature unless you know about horsehair worms (a.k.a. “Gordian worms” because their coiled up bodies look like Gordian knots), which we are fairly certain is what our reader found. The reader only asked if he found some sort of worm, and since horsehair worms are of course worms, the technical answer to our reader’s question is a mere “yes.” But one-word answers maketh a good article not, so we’ll give you some information about horsehair worms, with which we have some familiarity thanks to their prevalence and the frequency with which we receive questions about horsehair worms.