“What is this worm that I keep finding on my dining room floor?” asks Stacey in her submission regarding the white worm pictured below. “We have looked and can’t find them anywhere, but all of a sudden we find them in the morning and we clean them up. And when we get home in the afternoon we find a couple more.” Based on the excellent photo Stacey sent in, we think she found an acorn weevil larva. Acorn weevils are brown beetles that bore holes through acorns to lay their eggs inside. Once they hatch, the larvae will eat the insides of the acorns until they fall from the tree, after which the larvae will bore a new hole through the acorns to exit from, and consequently tunnel into the soil to pupate (the process of metamorphosing into the adult insect).

“Can you help me identify this worm found on my puppy’s paw after going outside?” this reader asks of this white, larva-looking critter crawling around on the floor in a video she sent in with her query. Her puppy recently had a tapeworm and so our reader is understandably “freaking out”.

One of our readers sent us a photo of a white worm-like creature she found while on a road trip. She said the photo was taken at a rest stop in West Virginia. After looking at her photo, we have determined that the “worm” that she found is a white grub.

A reader from Philadelphia wrote to us a while ago about some small, red worms he found in a “tree” (although the reader’s description suggested it was more like a bush). He said the worms looked a bit like earthworms, but that they were smaller, measuring about one or two inches in length. The reader also said the worms were thin. This is an instance where we really wish we had a picture. We are not only having difficulty imaging what this worm (or whatever it may be) looks like, but we also can’t picture the type of plant on which one of these creatures might be found. Based on what little we do know, it seems that our reader might have found grubworms (often spelled “grub worms,” and they are also known as “white grubs” or simply “grubs”). Grubworms are very common and are frequently found consuming plants, especially turfgrasses. We don’t know for sure if our reader found grubworms, but we can at least supply a little information about these common, plant-eating creatures.

Young grubs grow to full size rather rapidly. It takes only 3-4 weeks for them to reach their max.