The title of this article may seem a bit silly, but if you google this phrase, you will find over 13 million articles containing the words *little brown worms on clothes*. Since one of these articles is on my blog, and quite a few visitors find my blog searching for this phrase, I decided to find out a little more about this topic.

Almost all the articles I found are in the “questions and answers” category. And, perhaps not so strangely, many of them are not unique. Some are actually exact copies of the original questions and answers. I found three groups of these identical items:

1. “Little brown worms on clothes?” – This is the oldest group, originally posted in 2005 on the E-Bug.net forum. There are only two copies, the first appeared five years later on Yahoo Answers.

2. “What are these tiny brown worms found under clothes on the floor?” – This is the largest group of identical articles and according to Google it consists of 219 websites (including my own blog). The original question first appeared in 2008 on Yahoo Answers. Evidently, many webmasters thought that this question would be of interest to their visitors.

3. “I found little brown worms on my clothes and bedding.” – This was originally a question posed on the Canadian version of Yahoo Answers in 2010, and it only has 9 copies.

Other articles were not as cited as these three. I managed to find another 9 to read before succumbing to utter boredom.

So what was so interesting about the tiny brown worms on the clothes? What did people want to know about them?

What are they?

Most answers to this question suggested that the tiny worms were some kind of insect larva, most likely carpet beetle larvae. Other speculation included worms, millipedes, and “flea poop”.

What do I do with them?

The first thing, of course, is to get rid of them. If the tiny worms aren’t dead yet, they can be easily dispatched with whatever insecticide you have on hand.

The next problem is making sure the brown worms don’t come back. Therefore, you need to thoroughly clean the clothes in which they were found. Then fumigate the closet. And lastly, don’t let your clothes sit on the floor for weeks.

Conclusion?

I realize that none of the questions was answered by someone scientifically qualified to diagnose the nature of the tiny brown worms. Therefore, he would recommend that if you are not terribly upset about its appearance, or particularly worried about its reappearance, you should try the proposed solutions. But if you’re completely in awe of these “tiny brown maggots on clothes,” call a professional bug exterminator!