Fucking silverfish. They’re disgusting. I hate them.
Anyway, I try to keep them out of my house, but in the summer (when it’s more humid, I guess?) I often find their larvae just relaxing on the walls of my bathrooms or occasionally in the living areas. However, I almost never encounter a full-grown silverfish, dead or otherwise, in the house. Is there some secret place they’re all handing out without me?
How can I keep them out barring carpeting my floor with diatomaceous earth? It’s freezing outside, and I’ve already found two larvae in my bathroom. Argh.
Yep. They go through an incomplete metamorphosis, rather than a complete one (egg, larva, pupa, adult). They go through instars, and look like miniature adults when they hatch, then get a little bigger every time they molt.
The adults look like larva: that’s why they are so fucking disgusting. They are a major pest where I live too & there’s no way to keep them out. The only thing I have found that works is either an exterminator or silverfish packs.
Hmm, so maybe they aren’t silverfish larvae? That would actually be a relief. I own a lot of books and am terrified of a silverfish infestation. I’ll see if I can post some pics I took yesterday. The quality isn’t great because they are so small, but they definitely don’t look like miniature silverfish.
I flipped it over for the second and third pics to see what it looked like underneath. Please note, in one pic it looks like it has a long antenna, but that’s just an artifact from the poor quality. There were no protruding feelers or anything.
Ah! So those many-legged creatures like this one, aren’t silverfish, then? Is “house centipede” the correct name for that? I’ve always wondered why those were called “silverfish” around here, as they don’t look silver or like fish. The ones I’m thinking of are about three inches or so in length.
Okay, that is not the big silver insect, which I took to be a silverfish, that I saw crossing the street outside my workplace one afternoon.
The insect I saw had a thing making a rotating motion on its tail end, as if an invisible tiny person was trying to start an equally tiny Model T while the car rolled backwards.
Uncle Cecil once suggested “a swift shot to the exoskeleton”. He was referring to cockroaches, but I suspect it would work just as well for silverfish.
In the name of science, my best recourse may be to simply trap the next ones I find in the bathroom and raise them in a jar and see what insect they turn into. I’ll get a mason jar and put piece of newspaper, a carpet swatch, and a doll house cabinet in there just to cover my bases, food wise.
