Horsehair Harry—Part 2

When I first met Harry I was startled, as many other people before me have been. These critters look as if they could be a parasitic worm that recently exited the human body. Did he come from me!? Yikes!

More than one person has been shocked to spot a horsehair worm squirming in the toilet! They apparently get there after coming in the house inside a cricket and emerging when the cricket seeks toilet water. These worms have given people the creepies for ages. It looks eerie… almost malevolent. (See photo below.)

I also thought that Harry resembled the nasty guinea worm that infests people in Africa, where it enters a host as a tiny larva, after a person drinks stagnant water that is infested with these worms. About a year afterwards, the person experiences a painful, burning sensation as the worm forms a blister, usually on a leg or foot, and slowly emerges… over a foot long.

As I said, upon seeing Harry, my first shuddering thought was that he had emerged from me in the tub, the night before. Quickly and distastefully discarding that theory, I wondered if he could be some kind of eel or snake—yet he seemed impossibly thin to be either of them.

I often find critters in the tub the morning after a bath—such as frogs, toads, crickets, beetles, etc.—who need rescuing, lest they drown. I scoop them out with a sieve and deposit them gently on the ground. I did the same with Harry (although he wriggled mightily to escape me). Little did I know that he was probably exactly where he wanted to be, and resented being removed from his underwater haven.

I assume that Harry eventually found himself another watery abode for the winter. If so, he’ll go looking for group sex in the spring, tangling himself up with a few female worms. The females will later deposit their million or so eggs and then die. Later, the tiny larvae will hatch and then begin their grim lives, freeloading from another hapless cricket or other similar insect—killing it in the process. It’s just another of nature’s ways of carrying on life on our lovely little planet.

Horsehair Harry—Part 1

I recently met Harry the horsehair worm, the morning after a hot tub. I had never known such a creature existed, until I saw him squirming about at the bottom of the tub, as I began to drain it. I took a photo of him—later to investigate and discover what he was. Here’s some of what I found.

   

A horsehair worm is related to the nematode—a type of parasitic worm. It is extremely thin (about 1/16 inch) and several inches long… up to as much as a foot long. They writhe about, twisting themselves into a tangled blob that looks like a knotted cord. In fact, a common name for them is Gordian worm. An ancient myth has the worm spontaneously come alive from a horse’s tail hair—hence the name. In the fall they are usually found in pools of water (say, a horse drinking trough, in the old days), where they hunker down over the winter.

In the spring the horsehair worms get nasty. I last wrote about how we humans sometimes tend to romance nature. Here’s an example where nature gets pretty violent and ugly.

A group of worms will coil and knot themselves into orgiastic clumps, wherein the females become inseminated. Each mom then lays about  a million eggs that soon hatch and yield larvae—100 of them lined up end-to-end would hardly extend an inch. Biologists are not sure how, but the surviving larvae soon find their way into the gut of an insect—such as a cricket or a katydid, where they begin their odious parasitic life.

They first chew their way through the insect’s stomach wall and take up residence for a few weeks to a few months in the insect’s body cavity. The larvae have no food processing system—no stomach, no intestine, no anus. They have no circulatory or respiratory system either. They simply soak up nutrients from the interior of their hosts—absorbing food through their skin as they slowly destroy the host.

The larva molts several times and eventually grows into an adult worm—tightly coiled inside the insect’s body. It exudes a chemical that goes to the cricket’s brain—causing it to seek water and then drown itself, whereupon the worm breaks out and goes its way, leaving behind a hollowed-out, dead cricket.

It is now called a free-living worm, because it no longer lives the life of a parasite—when it was fully dependent for its existence on a host. Each mature worm lives through the winter (free at last!), never eating or excreting, just living on stored fat.

More on Harry next time…