![]() Horsehair worms are actually parasites (or technically parasitoids), but only to a few types of insects and crustaceans. Presumably, the reader is interested in the more specific matter of whether the worms he found are parasitical to humans. ![]() (We also have an article specifically about moth fly larvae in toilets.)Īgain, though, the reader wasn’t particularly hung up on identification, so we’ll move to the question of whether he found something that is parasitical. In any case, the length of the creatures our reader found pretty firmly establishes that they aren’t the type of insect larvae that one might more commonly expect to find in a toilet, like a moth fly larva. They are often quite a bit longer than 10 centimeters (four inches), making their hairlike qualities even more apparent, but they could be in the 10-centimeter range. Horsehair worms are, well, hairlike, and long ago people actually thought that they were hairs from horse tails that had somehow come alive. Assuming his measurements are accurate, the worm he found is extremely skinny (it is one millimeter in diameter!), particularly relative to its length, which is why we described them as “long.” And really the only worm we can think of that roughly possesses these body dimensions is a horsehair worm, and we have actually written about horsehair worms in toilets before. ![]() Unfortunately, the reader didn’t submit a picture, which for obvious reasons is always helpful to have, but he did provide a reasonably thorough description of the worms in question. What might the red worm in the toilet be, and are they parasitic? This is his main concern, and we will focus on this question, although the answer is of course tied to what exactly the reader found, so we’ll touch on the matter of identification as well. ![]() We recently received a question through the All About Worms Facebook page about “two red worms in the toilet bowl.” The worms were “10 cm long, thin, like one millimeter in diameter, and alive, even in the water, they were still moving.” The reader didn’t actually ask for an identification, but instead asked if the worms might be parasites. ![]()
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