There is no distinct head and the male differs from the female in having a forked tail. The diameter is usually not much more than a millimetre. They taper slightly at each end and reach lengths of about 22 cm to 30 cm. Alexander the Great cut the Gordian knot with his sword.Īdult Gordian Worms are shaped like long, thin pieces of cord. This is after Gordius, King of Phrygia, who tied an intricate knot and declared that whoever untied it should rule Asia. Their habit of writhing and contorting themselves into knots, with one or more worms tangled together, accounts for their common name, 'Gordian' Worm. Sadly, we weren’t able to identify the organism.Gordian worms belong to a small phylum, the Nematomorpha: a name that means 'form of a thread'. To summarize, one of our readers discovered a strange organism on his mattress encasement. We recommend he simply clean off the mattress and mattress encasement. We don’t think it has anything to do with his dog, but we have no way to confirm this. Unfortunately, we are stumped as to what our reader has discovered on his mattress encasement.
It may be possible that the horsehair worm thought it was near water and ejected itself from the host, killing itself and its host in the process, but this seems unlikely. Also, we don’t recognize the translucent organism as the typical host for a horsehair worm because we don’t know what it is. The main reason is that horsehair worms need a lot of moisture to survive, and usually exit their host when the host is near a body of water such as a pool, pond, lake, cistern, or water trough. However, this seems pretty far-fetched and improbable for a few reasons. Going off of our first idea, we suppose this could be a horsehair worm tangled in the remains of its host.
To us, this photograph looks like the organism from the first picture and the second picture have been combined. So, is this a horsehair worm? Let’s look at the final photo: Adult horsehair worms are free living organisms, but horsehair worm larvae are parasites that develop in the bodies of arthropods such as beetles, crickets, and cockroaches. As their name hints, horsehair worms resemble long strands of hair or pieces of thread. This creature has some resemblance to a horsehair worm. It looks like a long piece of of black string: It doesn’t look like any worm-like organism that we are familiar with.
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