So yesterday, I did a long-overdue cleaning under my bed, and found something very very distrubing. A few dozen small, moving larvae. Living on the hardwood floor, amongst the dust. I cleaned them up as best I could, flushed them, and then did the “heebie-jeebie shake.” But I don’t know where they came from, or if there are more of them somewhere.
There were several that looked like the one on the right and several smaller ones that looked more like the one on the left, but less hairy. I’d assumed they were different stages of the same species, but I suppose they could be 2 different ones.
The weird thing is, I don’t have a lot of flies buzzing around. So, I’m skeptical that they are maggots. Is there any reason they wouldn’t develop into full fledged flies? Or that they’d escape after getting their wings? Is there anything similar looking that they might be thast doesn’t turn into a fly or moth?
Aside from vaccuuming and mopping under the bed, spraying the area with bug spray and hot-water-washing the bedding, is there anything else I should do to make sure they don’t return?
Any advice will (literally) help me sleep better at night.
The housefly life cycle on this page (which is consistent with other sites) gives a larval stage of from 8 to 10 days. (Some sites extend that to 13 days.) Given that the number of eggs laid vary from 100 to 450 (depending on species), finding a few larva would suggest that they came from a single female (who mabye came out of winter torpor long enough to lay them if you had a recent warm spell?).
If you really had two species (and not differernt growth patterns from a single clutch) you are still only talking about two mother flies.
Well, flies can’t spontaneously generate, so figure out what they were living in (something organic); throw it out or clean it up, and Bob’s your uncle. You didn’t say what else you found under the bed, but it wouldn’t take much – a dropped piece of food might be enough. When I was a kid, I brought some acorns home because I thought they were cool. Next time I opened the drawer I’d put them in, there were maggots crawling about (which I handled with the stupid-young-kid technique of not using that drawer again for a couple of years).
Another possibility is that some small creature has perished in your house maybe under the floorboards or possibly even in your box mattress :eek: . If you have a cat, this is a real possibility. If this were the case, you probably would eventually notice an increase in the local fly population as well as maybe a distinct niffiness in the air. (Was there a reason you were cleaning the room?)
Well, there wasn’t much else under there except large amounts of dust. Since dust is mostly dead skin, is that organic enough?
I was cleaning because I pulled out the bed to install risers so we could put some rolling storage bins under the bed.
No cats, and I haven’t seen any rodents in the apartment, but I suppose it’s possible. Haven’t noticed any odd smells, though.
I’m really, really, really hoping it was just one or two mother flies confused by the warmish weather.
I’ve encountered moth larvae that looked at first blush like fly larvae - I mean really, it’s not as if I was about to start analyzing the stuff - and I wondered the same thing - then where are the flies? Then I realized, ok, no flies, but I would find moths every once in a while, and put 2 and 2 together. Then I wondered why I didn’t have MORE moths, and decided that a vast majority of the larvae probably died before it ever got to that stage.
So maybe they weren’t maggots, but moth larvae. Just a thought.
Here’s a picture of some Australian moth larvae, just for the purpose of demonstrating that they can look somewhat similar. At least, to my untrained, too-busy-doing-the-heebie-jeebie-boogaloo-to-really-look eye
Welp, my guess is that you uncovered a bunch of carpet beetle larvae. They’re small wormy things that eat cloth, dust, skin, etc. and hang out under beds, in closets and other dark, undisturbed areas. They grow up to shed their skins (you might have also seen some tiny, empty, velvet-like tubes – those are the skins) and turn into a black rounded bug that’s around 1/4 inch long.
If you’ve ever seen a bug that looks like a ladybug that’s all black, that’s yer common everyday adult carpet beetle. They can fly, but usually just walk around slowly. Unlike their kids, the adults prefer daylight and light.
I’ve been finding those tubes and the damn lavae all my life! I freakin’ hate them! Now I know what they are! I’m scarred for life, and I’ve run out of exclamation points.
Is there any way of getting rid of the blasted things?
I have seen something like a black ladybug in the same room, but I didn’t connect them. But, those larvae are way nastier looking than mine. (I can’t believe I’m saying that, but there’s always a nastier bug, I suppose). Mine didn’t have the furry backs or the creepy tails. And the larger ones were pure white, not brown. (Only the small ones had brown rings/stripes.)
You’re welcome, Lissa! I know how you feel – I’ve seen them occasionally but never really researched what they were. When I was a kid, I used to think those beetles were really large bloodsucking ticks! (I was easily frightened by everyday things, LOL.)
gonzoron, I definitely think we’re on the right track. Honestly, the larvae I’ve seen have never been as fugly as the ones in those pictures. Most of them have looked more like eensy weensy little wormies – no furriness visible (except for the discarded skins).
And the larger white ones are likely pupae, i.e. older larvae in the last stage prior to “blossoming” as an adult.
Pure white kind of says to me that it is a holometabolous (rather than hemimetabolous). So think moth or fly, not beetle. Since most fly larvae need pretty wet environments, I betcha what you are looking at is a moth larva, although they do tend to be somewhat more ornate than fly larvae, which in my experience tend to be pretty boring white wriggly things. The brownish rings you saw were probably denticle belts around the larvae. All larvae have them, they just may be different colors. Fly larvae do go through different molts (usually three instar stages), and they can look different.
The one thing that I would warn you is that all stages of the insect are of pretty variable length depending on the temperature. A shift from 25 centigrade to 18 centigrade moves the lifecycle of my favorite fly Drosophila melanogaster from 9 days to around 21 days. It is not inconceivable that these things have remained dormant all winter and are now only starting to get active as the temperature comes up.