One victim is an elderly woman and the other a one-year-old baby, both of whom live in Japan. The one notable counterexample we have found is in a study by the National Institute of Health detailing two cases of human horsehair-worm infection. As far as we can tell, though, this exhausts the list of possible horsehair-infection hosts. Although this doesn’t appear as common, there are reports of horsehair worms infecting snails and slugs, so this is the one pet of our reader’s that may fall victim to horsehair worms.
In addition to insects, horsehair worms will attack millipedes and centipedes, and they will also infect crustaceans on occasion. We have actually written specifically about horsehair worms and their victims before, and in this article we said what we said above: the worms primarily go after crickets, grasshoppers, and a few other types of insects. We will move forward with our answer accordingly.īased on everything we have read and written about horsehair worms, our reader doesn’t have much to worry about. So, there is every reason to assume our reader found horsehair worms and basically no reason to assume she didn’t. Crickets are one of the primary insects horsehair worms infect, and the worms only leave the host insects’ bodies when they are near water, which explains why they exited the crickets’ bodies upon being put in the aquarium, in which there was evidently some dish of water. Moreover, the scenario in which the worms were found is perfectly consistent with horsehair worms. This creature, with its long thin body, does look exactly like a horsehair worm.
Basically, are horsehair worms harmful to any creatures other than the insects they commonly prey on, like crickets, cockroaches, and grasshoppers, as well as to non-insects, like millipedes and centipedes?īefore the reader asked any other question, she wanted to make sure she found horsehair worms, and to that end she submitted this picture: More generally, she is wondering if horsehair worms are harmful to amphibians, or if they could present any dangers to her family, dog, chickens, or ducks. Our reader is first of all wondering if the horsehair worms are harmful or in any way dangerous to her frog or snail. When she woke up, she found several horsehair worms in the water of the aquarium. (She referred to them as “horse hair worms,” which is reasonable, although this is a deviation from the common spelling.) In her aquarium is a tree frog and a snail, and the other night she put ten crickets in the aquarium to feed the frog. We received a long and fairly complicated, but interesting, question a couple of days ago about horsehair worms in a reader’s aquarium.
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