I found something very odd a few minutes ago. It was about a quarter of a cm long (very rough approximation…but very small) sort of triangular in shape, crawling laboriously up the wall. It appeared to be a larva of some sort, and when looked at under a magnifying glass it was a maggoty looking larva that is dragging a triangular tunnel of what appears to be debris along behind. I disturbed it (by knocking it onto a piece of paper) and it retreated entirely into this tunnel.
It sounds like a type of casebearer. There are a number of different types in the U.S., but here’s a photo of a household casebearer (from the southeast; you may have a different type, such as a larch casebearer or something). It’s even climbing up a wall, like yours was:
BINGO! Casebearer it is! I KNEW this was the right place to ask this question and get a quick answer!
Moths are bad things in this house, between the wool and the wildbird food and the household bird food…the clothing stored downstairs too. Geez.
Thanks!
PS - just checked out a google of casebearer, and it appears that they’e not a threat to my food or clothes – feed on pet hair (of which there is plenty in this place)
This thread reminded me that one of my tenant neighbors has the the very cool surname of Larva. No kidding. Practically moved in to the new digs just because of that alone. I keep looking at his mailbox and envisioning a huge, pale, shiny grub sitting human-style next to a beer on his couch under a bare light bulb and making peristaltic contractions while watching Wheel of Fortune.
Here’s something I think is weird. We generally consider the “worm” or larva to be a sort of pre-bug kind of thing. We think of the dragonfly as the bug and it’s larva to be sort of a “baby bug”. Yet a great many insects (dragonflies, some moths and butterflys) are in a larval state for several years and only become insects for a single season for the purpose of mating.
Wouldn’t that mean that the larva is the real bug while the insect is merely a spawning mechanism?
A while back we found one of these clinging to our windshield. We had no idea what it was and named it Cyril.
We figured it was a space alien. But it turned out to just be a hag moth larva. Isn’t it cool though? It could wave its tenticles around and it was sticky underneath.
