The reader only mentioned that he found the worm on an overcast day, but perhaps it rained earlier, or maybe the wet concrete had some small pockets of water that drew the horsehair worm out. For this reason, people often find them in swimming pools or in puddles after it rains. Horsehair worms grow and live in their hosts, and then will exit their body when it is near water. Horsehair worm victims primarily consist of insects like crickets, grasshoppers, beetles, and cockroaches, but they occasionally infect crustaceans as well. Horsehair worms are parasitoids, which basically means they are a particularly brutal parasite – they not only live off a host, but ultimately kill it. These worms all belong to the Nematomorpha phylum. Like so many other common worm names, “horsehair worm” can refer to thousands of different species of worm. Obviously, this isn’t true, but this old origin story captures the rather extreme body dimensions of horsehair worms. Through some sort of mystical transformation, these long hairs would transform into living worms. Horsehair worms are so called because long ago people thought that they were once the tail hairs of horses.
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