We aren’t sure if the specimens our reader found in the soil are mealworms or wireworms! We wish her the best of luck with her garden!

We believe the “creepy crawly” our reader was bitten by is a click beetle larva, a.k.a. a wireworm. These creatures don’t usually bite unless attacked or under threat, so we don’t know why it bit our reader while he was sleeping.

A reader wrote to us a couple of days ago about some brown worms that she vacuumed off of her carpet. (Actually, it isn’t clear if the brown worms were on the carpet, but the picture she sent us shows the vacuum on carpet, and that’s why we make this assumption, which may be is relevant.) Unfortunately, we weren’t given any information about creature, but, as mentioned, we were sent a photo, and this photo may depict a wireworm (sometimes spelled as “wire worm”). However, she might have also found a carpet beetle larvae, so we detail both possibilities below.

We received a question from a reader a couple of days ago on the All About Worms Facebook page about a pink worm in her bedroom on the carpet. (It’s actually more like a pink, brown, and tan worm, or perhaps a pinkish, brownish, tannish worm – it’s hard to define the worm’s color. See the picture below.) In addition to finding the worm in her bedroom on the carpet, she also found one in her living room on the laminate floor. So, the worms aren’t limited to one part of the house, and she evidently isn’t finding them in particular places (like under furniture, in a pantry, and so on). The reader happens to have two dogs, but she doesn’t think they are related to the presence of the pink worms, or in any case she doesn’t think the worms came from the dogs. Having found no information about the creature, she turned to us to ask what this pink worm in her bedroom and living room might be.

A reader wrote to us to ask what kind of worms eat potatoes underground. Worms are evidently borrowing into our reader’s potatoes (or “potatos,” if you simply can’t tolerate the randomness of English spelling), leaving close to nothing behind. Not surprisingly, the reader was also wondering how to get rid of these potato worms. Of course, in order to get rid of a worm you need to know what it is, so we’ll begin by answering our reader’s first question: we suspect he found wireworms (sometimes incorrectly spelled “wire worms”), which may or may not be attacking the potatoes in conjunction with another creature. Without any pictures or a physical description of the creature our reader found, it hard to be sure that he did in fact find wireworms, but wireworms definitely seem to be the most likely candidate. In most discussions involving worms and potatoes, wireworms come up.