“I have these crawling types of worms/maggots appearing from nowhere on my ceiling/walls in my living room”, writes Billy about the bristly, striped creature pictured below. “They only appear at height and cannot see them emanating from anywhere. They just appear! They seem to be drawn to the brightest points in the room (directly above lamps etc). I’m attaching a few pics (one including my finger for size reference) and the others are zoomed in pics so quality isn’t great. It would be great if you could identify them so I can finally deal with them.” Billy is absolutely right in saying the quality of these photos is not great, and unfortunately that makes it much harder for us to identify the organisms. Given what we can see from the photo, we would like to conclude that this is a carpet beetle larva.

“What is this?” asks Ayoade in his submission regarding the bristly, striped, bug-like creature pictured below. He does not provide any further context – something that we always advise our readers do. Fortunately, in this case, we have seen this creature so many times that we do not need more context to identify it. This is a carpet beetle larva. We can tell that it is a carpet beetle larva based on its brown coloration, stripes, long bristles, six prolegs, and the ovate shape of its body. Now, although we were able to identify the organism without it, context would have still come in handy when it comes to knowing how many of these Ayoade found, and where he found them. Regardless, we will simply give a basic overview of carpet beetle larvae.

“I found this at the bottom of my clothes hamper,” says this reader about the brown and white-striped organism pictured below. Although our reader does not pose any questions in her submission, we assume that she wants to know what this is and how to handle it.

A reader in Toronto, Ontario found this worm-like critter on his mattress after taking his sheets off to wash. The creature in question is brown and beige-striped with a darker-colored, brown head, and our reader states he would appreciate any help with this matter.