These things appeared in friends flat. What are they?

  • @Fosheze
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    1092 months ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
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      542 months ago

      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.

      • @Hugin
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        152 months ago

        Yup. I had an infestation thar took months to get rid of. Turns out they were in an old bag of dried peppers.

      • wellDuuh
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        -472 months ago

        Lol, Commander in Chief, giving instructions. Got it.

        • @[email protected]
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          2 months ago

          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.

          • wellDuuh
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            22 months ago

            A flamethrower might work too.

            That’ll do it

    • @[email protected]
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      112 months ago

      I hear they are very nutricious 🤔… Everything is so expensive now. So… Endless food source? Shittylpt?

    • @FooBarrington
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      82 months ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        72 months ago

        … 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?

        • @FooBarrington
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          162 months ago

          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.

          • @[email protected]
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            12 months ago

            The snakes can be dealt with by the cats, which in turn are chased away by the dogs. Now you have no maggots and many dogs, yay!

      • @Fosheze
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        42 months ago

        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.

        • @FooBarrington
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          52 months ago

          Luckily they are tiny tiny wasps, like specks of dust. Anything bigger and I would have run!

          • @Fosheze
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            32 months ago

            Oh, cool! When you said parasitic wasp my brain immediately pictured a tarantula hawk wasp.

            • @[email protected]
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              1 month ago

              The parasitic ones (well, parasitoid since they live free as adults) are very different, sometimes literally microscopic, and never harmful to humans AFAIK.

              Gruesomely fascinating and widely studied, though. Relevant recent XKCD.

            • @FooBarrington
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              22 months ago

              Anything fruitfly and above would have meant I’ll just move, but yours sounds so much more horrifying. Oh god.

      • @[email protected]
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        12 months ago

        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 😭

    • QuizzaciousOtter
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      62 months ago

      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.

  • PonyOfWar
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    652 months ago

    Yes, it is. If they’re in a flat, probably flour moths. Your friend should check any containers with food, especially grains.

    • @ambitious_bonesOP
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      632 months ago

      We eventually found the source. They came from a pack of dried figs.

      • @Rob
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        172 months ago

        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.

  • @[email protected]
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    2 months ago

    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

  • @[email protected]
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    162 months ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
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      222 months ago

      Or, just hear me out—you could throw the whole thing away and try to never think about the maggots again.

      • @[email protected]
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        142 months ago

        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.

        • @FuryMaker
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          152 months ago

          La la la (puts fingers in ears) I’m not listening!

        • Lucy :3
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          42 months ago

          Except the USDA and FDA specifically are irrelevant in any other country.

          • @[email protected]
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            22 months ago

            That’s true.

            Do you happen to know of any countries where the allowable level of contamination is zero?

            • @[email protected]
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              21 month ago

              If there is one, they’re lying.

              That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not gross, at least subjectively, though.

        • @GroundedGator
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          22 months ago

          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.

  • Anna
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    72 months ago

    The kind I don’t want anywhere near me or any my belongings and most definitely nowhere near my food.

  • @[email protected]
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    2 months ago

    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.

    @[email protected]’s suggestion fits better.

  • nocturne
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    42 months ago

    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.

    • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet
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      2 months ago

      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?

  • @[email protected]
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    -22 months ago

    Flea maggot. A piece of meat hidden that fell somewhere and you can’t see it. There should be more there