# strange worm?



## Opivy (Aug 23, 2009)

Been expecting my giant shield to molt, and just now looking inside his cup theres a little tiny worm - Anyone know what this is? It takes one little step at a time. Should I be concerned?


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## Katnapper (Aug 23, 2009)

I have no idea what it could be... but I would remove it promptly.


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## Opivy (Aug 23, 2009)

I did. It was strange, it moved around by curling it's rear end up near it's head - then stretching. No idea what it was, but it was tiny - Upon searching I found talk of "hair worms" I just hope it wasn't one of these. My mantis has fallen a couple of times, and is moving very slow. I assumed it was because he's due to molt


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## AmandaLynn (Aug 23, 2009)

It sounds like, what I call, an inch worm, which isn't really a worm but many different species of larvae like tiny caterpillars that inch along.


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## PhilinYuma (Aug 24, 2009)

If it is an inchworm, this might help:


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## Opivy (Aug 24, 2009)

ahh, so a some moths did the nasty infront of my young and undearaged mantis?! The authorities will be notified, I assure you.


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## planetq (Aug 24, 2009)

Hahaha


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## Rick (Aug 24, 2009)

I figured it was an inchworm when you described how it walked.


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## hibiscusmile (Aug 24, 2009)

yea, and dont listen to these guys about the inchworm tale, it'll make your hair stand on end


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## Ntsees (Aug 24, 2009)

Opivy said:


> Been expecting my giant shield to molt, and just now looking inside his cup theres a little tiny worm - Anyone know what this is? It takes one little step at a time. Should I be concerned?


Hm...have you fed your mantid any butterflies/moths lately? For me, when moths come to the backyard light at night, I capture them and feed them to my mantids (I leave alone the beautiful looking moths though to populate my backyard i.e. sphinx moth  ). Upon getting captured and eaten, the moths would drop it's eggs to the bottom. After a few days, these tiny worms/caterpillars would hatch and they walk like how you explained. That's the only way how I see tiny worms in my mantid cage. If you haven't fed your mantids any moths lately, then I don't know what it is.


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## Apocanaut (Sep 6, 2009)

I had a similar event occur the other day. My budwing caught a house fly and I guess only ate the head (not even the legs). When I checked on her, there was a disembodied fly abdomen on the floor below the mantis with several very tiny white worm things inching around like your description, but the fly abdomen itself was also filled with them. It was pretty gross. My mantis seems to have understood that it might not have been a good idea to eat them all, though. Parasites, maybe? Uck. I can't figure out how that fly was still alive with all that gross inside of it.


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## AmandaLynn (Sep 12, 2009)

Apocanaut said:


> I had a similar event occur the other day. My budwing caught a house fly and I guess only ate the head (not even the legs). When I checked on her, there was a disembodied fly abdomen on the floor below the mantis with several very tiny white worm things inching around like your description, but the fly abdomen itself was also filled with them. It was pretty gross. My mantis seems to have understood that it might not have been a good idea to eat them all, though. Parasites, maybe? Uck. I can't figure out how that fly was still alive with all that gross inside of it.


I found the exact same thing today. :huh: They look like tiny maggots, it's really kinda creepy. They couldn't be the flies larvae, could it?


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## PhilinYuma (Sep 12, 2009)

AmandaLynn said:


> I found the exact same thing today. :huh: They look like tiny maggots, it's really kinda creepy. They couldn't be the flies larvae, could it?


Not larvae. They'd have to be parasites, but in my (very) limited experience, I have only come across parasites (wasps) that paraitize the flies' pupae. These are much better for the parasite, because they stay in one place, while a dying fly could drown, taking the parasites with it, but some parasites won't read and never learn. Anyone know more about this?


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## AmandaLynn (Sep 12, 2009)

PhilinYuma said:


> Not larvae. They'd have to be parasites, but in my (very) limited experience, I have only come across parasites (wasps) that paraitize the flies' pupae. These are much better for the parasite, because they stay in one place, while a dying fly could drown, taking the parasites with it, but some parasites won't read and never learn. Anyone know more about this?


Maybe _Muscidifurax zaraptor, Spanglia_ spp., or something like that? The larvae are about the same size as fruit fly larvae. The fly probably emerged from it's pupal stage before the parasites hatched from there eggs. I never knew that there are such tiny wasps.


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## AmandaLynn (Sep 24, 2009)

After learning a few new facts about flies today, I do think the little maggots were the flies own larva. There was a dead mouse in my yard today, and I watched a fly deposit several eggs on it, but they weren't actually eggs. When I looked a little closer, I could see that the "eggs" were burrowing down into the mouses fur. She was depositing live larva. So my final conclusion is that, the fly my mantis ate with the abdomen filled with maggots was not a housefly hosting a bunch of parasites, but a flesh fly, such as, _Sarcophaga vomitoria_(nice name :blink: ), or _Sarcophaga carnaria_, and was merely pregnant.


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## PhilinYuma (Sep 24, 2009)

AmandaLynn said:


> After learning a few new facts about flies today, I do think the little maggots were the flies own larva. There was a dead mouse in my yard today, and I watched a fly deposit several eggs on it, but they weren't actually eggs. When I looked a little closer, I could see that the "eggs" were burrowing down into the mouses fur. She was depositing live larva. So my final conclusion is that, the fly my mantis ate with the abdomen filled with maggots was not a housefly hosting a bunch of parasites, but a flesh fly, such as, _Sarcophaga vomitoria_(nice name :blink: ), or _Sarcophaga carnaria_, and was merely pregnant.


This is really nicely worked out and parts of it are correct. Tachinid flies (or at least some, including the ones you mentioned) are ovoviviporous (Zephyr talked about this a while back, re. cockroaches). This doesn't mean that they carry their "babies" around inside them like a bunch of fetuses, but rather that the larva develops almost completely inside the egg and can break out of its egg case on hatching. The easiest way to see this is to watch a pregnant guppy or swordtail laying eggs. As each egg falls to the bottom of the tank, a tiny fish breaks out of the "shell" and swims away. So if the house fly was parasitized, it was not through its GI tract. Superfreak pointed out elsewhere, today, that almost (there's always an exception somewhere) no insect eggs can survive the host's digestive system. In mantids and a number of other insects, the food is bound in a chitinous sac (peritrophic membrane) that squeezes out anything digestible and disposes of the rest. Nematodes, as she suggested, can survive in both vertebrate and invertebrate GI tracts, but they live off the partially digested food in the gut and seldom destroy the host, which is the difference between a parasite and a parasitoid. When you find an insect with its abdomen full of icky maggots, they are living in the abdomen and feeding off the insect's fat and protein, not in the gut. It is true that some herbivores eat the eggs of tachinid flies, but they quickly hatch, often into a planidium (c.f.) as you saw, and, I assume, eat their way out of the insect's gut and into its tissues before they can be digested.

There is another possibility, and to my mind the most likely one, regarding your maggot filled housefly. Phorid flies lay their eggs in frass and dead insects. They reproduce at an amazing rate, and it is possible that the fly became infested post mortem.

I hope that this helps a bit and doesn't confuse us both even more!


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## hibiscusmile (Sep 24, 2009)

Can we become infected? This is why I hate summer, all the gore comes alive on the forum :wacko: h34r: 

ps on second thought, I don't wanna know, so don't answer.


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## AmandaLynn (Sep 24, 2009)

Doesn't everything with an egg case, "break out of it's egg case on hatching", ? I think I understand what you are saying though. At some point the larva would have been in an egg case. What I'm thinking is, that they had already hatched and begun crawling around at the time I _noticed_ them. I don't recall having ever seen a guppy give birth, but I did witness a fly depositing live larva on a dead animal yesterday. The larva were laid, and instantly stretched out, (I'm assuming, hatched from it's egg case, like you mentioned, although I did not see the egg case) then immediately, within seconds, disapeared into the animals fur. Also, it was not a housefly, it was some kind of wild fly, much bigger than a housefly. If it had been a housefly, then yes, I would agree with you, that they were in fact parasites, but it was certainly not a housefly. Needless to say, I'm not convinced that the larva were parasites. I'm sticking to my theory, that it was just a pregnant fly and upon being exposed to the outside world, the larva simply hatched and were moving on with their lives. I'm 100% positive that the fly didn't become infested post mortem. I had just cleaned out the enclosure and put the fly in question in, for my mantis. The fly was eaten within minutes, and it wasn't long after being tossed aside by my mantis, that I noticed the larva. As fast as some flies may reproduce, there still just wasn't enough time for that to be a possibility.


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## PhilinYuma (Sep 24, 2009)

Ha! You're quite right! I meant to say that they emerge from their egg sacs when they are _laid_!  

House fly eggs take about twelve hours to hatch, so it is unlikely that it was a housefly, but I guess that it could have been a flesh fly. My only problem with that idea is that those flies only have a few fully mature eggs at a time, so far as I know. An interesting mystery!


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