A woman recently contacted us with the following image of a bug she estimates to be about 1/4-inch or smaller. She found this creature on her couch, and from the picture we can see it is brown and tan striped in color, with a darker brown head at one of its ends.

We received a question through the All About Worms Facebook page the other day about some tan larvae with brown stripes and legs that were found on a reader’s cat. (We write “tan larvae” to keep things simple, but the reader referred to them as “Beige/tannish,” so essentially the larvae are some sort of off-white color.) The larvae are quite small, about the size of an “I” on a keyboard, to use the reader’s helpful comparison. The reader said the larvae had legs “like a centipede,” by which she might mean the legs are clearly noticeable, and she also reports that the larvae jump. The reader was wondering if she had found found flea larvae, but worried she might have found something worse.