download finger horsehair worm in humans

After a horsehair worm grows and matures over a period of about four to twenty weeks, it will exit its insect host, but generally only if there is water nearby. Without getting too deep into the details, which are covered in our article Horsehair Worms and Their Victims, horsehair worms are parasites that live inside insects like crickets and grasshoppers. Some worms are long and some worms are super skinny, but they aren’t long and super skinny worms apart from horsehair worms.įinally, the reader is finding the worms after it rains, and horsehair worms need moisture to survive. Two, the reader’s description of the worms he found could essentially be nothing but a horsehair worms.

People write to us about them fairly frequently, so it clearly isn’t unusual to find them. Why are we so confident our reader found horsehair worms? For one, they are common. (For the record, horsehair worms are actually not as thin as a strand of hair – they are about as wide as the lead in a mechanical pencil.) Thus, the worms were at one point not thought to be hairlike, but literally hair. In fact, the reason they are called horsehair worms is that people long ago believed that the worms were formally tail hairs of horses that changed into living beings.

And here are two more images that depict horsehair worms in the their natural element (minus the human finger in the second image):Īs you can see in all of these pictures, horsehair worms are indeed hairlike worms.

Download finger horsehair worm in humans