A woman recently contacted us about discovering that worms were crawling on her and her mattress when she woke up for two days in a row. The worms appear to be somewhat oval in shape (though it could be the worm contracting its body to make itself smaller) and are described as being almost flat and a ‘greenish’ color by our reader.

A reader (or, technically, the daughter-in-law of a reader who wrote in on her behalf) found some small, green worms in her garden. She recently moved into a new house and was doing some preliminary gardening work when she found the “tiny green worms,” to use the reader’s precise wording, and she was wondering what they might be. We’ll do our best to assist, starting with this: the small, green worms our reader found might have been small and green, but they almost certainly aren’t worms. Rather, they are probably insect larvae, or possibly caterpillars, both of which are commonly mistaken for worms, which is actually a scientifically imprecise term.