The worms are completely unobstructive, so flushing them wouldn’t cause any plumbing issues. It is unclear how this could conceivably cause any harm, in fact. Perhaps the reader also found a dead insect lying around the toilet and failed to appreciate the connection between this and the worm he found.Īs concerns our reader’s specific question, you could certainly flush a horsehair worm down the toilet. If one of these insects goes near standing water, like a toilet, the horsehair worm could exit the host. However, it is certainly possible that a horsehair worm could end up in your house for the simple reason that insects carrying horsehair worms can end up in your house.
We have written about horsehair worms in swimming pools, for instance, and people also find horsehair worms in puddles and other naturally occurring bodies of water. We have not received a question before about horsehair worms in toilets, as people tend to find them outside. Having reached maturation after several weeks inside the host, the worm will exit the insect when it comes near water, as adult horsehair worms live in aquatic environments. However, they are extremely skinny – they look like dental floss – and they can coil up tightly, thus allowing them to fit into the small interior of an insect.
Given the small environment in which they mature, it is perhaps surprising that horsehair worms commonly grow to be a foot long (and sometimes much longer). When insects eat these plants, horsehair worms slowly grow inside them. The eggs of horsehair worms are laid in small cysts on several different plants. These hosts are generally insects such as grasshoppers, crickets, and cockroaches. They are parasitoids because rather than simply being parasitic on a host, they actually kill it.
The various horsehair worm species belong to the phylum Nematomorpha, so named because horsehair worms look like nematodes (a.k.a. Unlike most questions we receive, the reader did not ask us to identify anything, so we’ll take it for granted that he did in fact find a horsehair worm. So we’ll focus on the question “can you flush a horsehair worm down the toilet,” but we’ll cover a little more ground so the article has broader applicability. i thinking.in my toilet do i flush it?” Obviously, a horsehair worm (or “horse hair worm,” to use the reader’s understandable misspelling) is involved, and it seems to be in the toilet, and the reader’s only question is about whether or not he can flush it. Or at least we think this is what the question is about, as the wording is a little unclear: “I have horse hair worm. We recently received a question from a reader about a horsehair worm in his toilet.
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