These things appeared in friends flat. What are they?
Grain moth larva. Good luck. The damn things are a pain to get rid of once you have them. You’ll want to pitch any food that isn’t 100% air tight sealed (bags or boxes of cereal, rice, flour, sugar, noodles, etc.) and then clean out any cabinets really well to make sure you get rid of as many eggs as possible. After that make sure you don’t leave any food unsealed for the next few months because odds are they will keep popping back up ocasionally for a bit and if they can get into anything when they do then the infestation starts all over. As far as infestations go they aren’t the worst to deal with but they are anoying.
Which is the worst to deal with, in your opinion?
Bed bugs. Easily.
Now that I think of it, duh!
Not just sealed. They will get into sealed cardboard boxes and through thin plastic. Like bags, forget it. Everything either needs to go into glass, metal, the fridge, or thick plastic, like tupperware. Also they will eat stuff you’d never expect, like spices, even hot pepper.
Interesting. I wonder if that’s all moths - flies experience capsaicin the same way as we do.
Yup. I had an infestation thar took months to get rid of. Turns out they were in an old bag of dried peppers.
Lol, Commander in Chief, giving instructions. Got it.
person gives helpful instructions on how to clear an insect infestation
“lol bossy”
🤡
I’m not giving anyone orders, just trying to convey how ridiculously anal you have to be about it get rid of them. I went through several rounds of “surely these things will be ok, they aren’t open / in a ziplock / not something it would possibly want to eat” repeatedly failing to get rid of them before finally putting EVERYTHING into glass, Tupperware or the fridge.
A flamethrower might work too.
A flamethrower might work too.
That’ll do it
I just dealt with them a couple of months ago, absolute fucking nightmare. What solved it in the end was parasitic wasps - you can order them online. I received 3 letters in the mail a couple of weeks apart, each containing a small paper card with parasitic wasp eggs, which you put close to the source of larvae. The wasps lay their eggs inside the larvae eggs, but you’ll need to use all three letters to get all larvae throughout their cycle.
Sounds weird as fuck, but immediately solved the problem.
… How did you get rid of the wasps? Or is it a ‘they live here now, Bob’s the king of section 3-b’ sort of thing?
Getting rid of the wasps was easy, the frogs took care of them. The annoying part was getting rid of the snakes…
Nah, the wasps are tiny, I could barely see specks of dust moving around. They just died off after the larvae were gone.
Gonna be honest chief, I would sooner burn my house down than live with wasps.
But thinking about it, I’m willing to bet that house centipedes would clear them up too. Those voracious little buggers eat everything.
Luckily they are tiny tiny wasps, like specks of dust. Anything bigger and I would have run!
Oh, cool! When you said parasitic wasp my brain immediately pictured a tarantula hawk wasp.
The parasitic (well, parasitoid since they live free as adults) ones are very different, sometimes literally microscopic, and never harmful to humans AFAIK.
Gruesomely fascinating and widely studied, though. Relevant recent XKCD.
Anything fruitfly and above would have meant I’ll just move, but yours sounds so much more horrifying. Oh god.
I hear they are very nutricious 🤔… Everything is so expensive now. So… Endless food source? Shittylpt?
Well, you’re actually guaranteed to get less food out than in. Insect farming is only a LPT if you have something we can’t eat to feed them, or are a bodybuilder who needs more protein than you can feasibly get from plants.
Nono, you got a point.
That’s just farming, only on a reeeeeeaaaaly small scale.
Or at a homestead scale.
I just fought them off in my apartment. Everything they said is correct. I just want to add that I bought some kind of spray to kill them and it was very effective. Got rid of them in two applications.
Whay they 👆 said, have fun. They’re a pain in the ass to get rid of.
I sealed all my stuff airtight and still, every day 2 to 5 popped up every day and i vacuumed them in. I have some mugs that my niece and nephew painted and i keep them on my cabinet so they don’t break. Turned out in one of them were christmas cookies that they made 2 years ago 😭
Yes, it is. If they’re in a flat, probably flour moths. Your friend should check any containers with food, especially grains.
We eventually found the source. They came from a pack of dried figs.
Do yourself a favor and throw out all other food ad well, unless it’s completely sealed off. Their eggs take a while to hatch, so you don’t want to see them pop up again in a month.
Then clean the entire kitchen with a spray of vinegar and water. Pay extra attention to corners, crevices, and places like screws. Their eggs are tiny.
You can also get a pheromone trap to avoid them spreading further.
It’s clearly a gummy worm. You should be safe to eat it immediately. It should taste like what a flavour engineer in the 80s thought peaches kinda taste like
You can put whatever they have infested in the freezer for a few days, then pick them out and transfer the contents to a sealed container.
When I lived in the tropics it was quite normal to have these in flour, grains, dried legumes, dried chillies etc.
Or, just hear me out—you could throw the whole thing away and try to never think about the maggots again.
I knew someone would come back with something like this.
You can pretty much forget about eating the things I listed then, oh and dried pasta too.
Besides, if you don’t think you’re eating that stuff already then you haven’t looked at the USDA or FDA Food Defect Levels. There are allowable levels for fun things like insect parts and rodent droppings.
La la la (puts fingers in ears) I’m not listening!
3-5 mg of “mammalian feces” per dry pound.
All water statistically has Hitler’s pee in it by now.
Except the USDA and FDA specifically are irrelevant in any other country.
That’s true.
Do you happen to know of any countries where the allowable level of contamination is zero?
If there is one, they’re lying.
That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not gross, at least subjectively, though.
My grandfather worked in a lab at a brewery. His job was to sample grain coming in. Rejected grain cars were sent to the cereal factories.
Free protein kind king!
HAKUNA… MATATA!
Not free if they eat your shit.
…but if you seal everything and make small holes in to your neighbours flat…
Sapper Morton approves.
The kind I don’t want anywhere near me or any my belongings and most definitely nowhere near my food.
Looks like some fried rice I got once in Santa Carla back in the 80s. Thinking about it, eating take out with some dudes in a cave under a pier probably was not the smartest of things to do.
You’re still going on about that? They were only noodles, Michael! Noodles and rice. Tell me, how could a billion Chinese people be wrong?
I’m quite outside of my expertise here, but I think it might be a mealworm. A beetle larvae. That would technically make it not a maggot (which are fly larvae).But it’s just a guess.@PonyOfWar@pawb.social’s suggestion fits better.
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Flea maggot. A piece of meat hidden that fell somewhere and you can’t see it. There should be more there
no it’s not, this is a moth not flea
Ok Mr maggot
That’s a mealworm, and they make great fish bait, or lizard food.
I’m 100% sure that’s not it - mealworms have hard segments, that looks fleshy.
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