The small brown worm our reader found on her bed is a carpet beetle larva. Unfortunately, these organisms can be really annoying and destructive, but luckily our reader only found a single larva, so she should be able to start cleaning in time to prevent an infestation.

One of our readers sent in this photo of a translucent worm found beside her bed on her mattress sticker. She hopes to identify the creature, which appears to be transparent in color, with a body segmented into separate bulbous parts and a blackish-brown inside, as well as two cerci at its tail.

We recently received a message from a reader via the All About Worms Facebook page about some very small white worms he has been finding in his bed. (He actually sent us 12 messages about the extremely small white worms, leading us to think he is sending messages via the Facebook chat window, a default option that can be changed, for what it is worth.) The worms stand up vertically and look like the “those caterpillar[s] you see every year by the thousands that come out of the trees here in Tennessee,” by which he might mean they look like inchworms, the larval form of geometer moths. In all the messages he sent, which included a number of pictures, he never actually asked us to identify the small white worms in the bed. Rather, he was primarily concerned with his and his family’s safely. He feared that the worms might burrow into their skin. So, our principal task is to address whether these exceedingly small white worms are harmful or dangerous, but we will also add a couple of notes about identification as we go along.

A reader recently wrote to us about two small worms she found in her bed. (The reader called them “worms,” even though they might be some other creature, like larvae.) She was understandably a little concerned and disgusted, as people who find worms in their bed tend to be. The reader was most concerned about the possibility that these worms (or larvae or some other creature) came out of her body during the night, and she didn’t directly ask what kind of worms she found in her bed. However, the two matters are of course related, for if we identify the worm, we might be able to tell if it came out of her body. (We don’t think so.)