“What is this?” asks this reader from LaGrange, Texas in her submission. She describes the worm as being “about two inches long and as big around as a pinky finger.”

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.