Mealworm infestation??

[Hybridfish7]

First of all, I know, this is outrageous, and just when you thought I couldn't do more atrocities to this house.

Anyway, I have geckos. Said geckos I feed mealworms. Sometimes the mealworms get out of the food bowl, climb up the background, and escape. Every now and then I see them around the house and think that's where they came from. Until now however. As I'm making my bed and vacuuming spilled fish food, I notice a small group of mealworms (8) eating fish food that I appear to have missed. I pick them all up and feed them to the buenos aires tetras. Some of them were small enough that I know they were born there.

I know for a fact that they were coming out of the carpet. I also know that mealworms will eat just about anything, and some companies have even bred them to eat styrofoam and plastic. The carpet sounds crunchy in that area and I don't know if it's just me stepping on pupae and mealworms under there or if there's something wrong with the floor. I'm tempted to cut a hole in it to see the damage. Inherently I know they probably can't get far in the walls or anything because they're probably not going to eat just straight dry wood, and if they eat any kind of softwood they're going to die. I also have found adult beetles in a small congregation (3) above the carpet, and of course found the worms themselves, so I know they're probably not deep in there. I just want to make sure they're not capable of eating into the structure of the house or something.

Bottom line is, my bedroom redo/cleanout is officially pushed forward to begin Wednesday, as I will be rained in and thus not tempted to do anything else.

 

[jjohnwm]

Wow...I bet a nice growth of good old fashioned mould sounds pretty appealing right now, huh?

Crunchy carpet...regardless of what is causing the crunchiness...is pretty disgusting. Is there any possibility of peeling back the carpet entirely in that area to see what's going on under there? If there's an underpad, that will add to the PITA factor of the job, but simply prying off the quarter-round from the baseboard should allow you to pull the entire carpet away to do some snooping. It's going to take some furniture moving and isn't something you do on a whim, but I personally would really, really want to see the situation under there with my own two eyes.

Good luck with this. I used mealworms for many years back in the day, and never had a problem with them escaping and establishing themselves as a breeding colony. It sounds like you really need to re-do their housing to prevent escapes; they are really clumsy, terrible climbers, so it's not tough to keep them confined; a cover is needed as the adults can actually fly. But, as with many other infestations, it's much more difficult to put the genie back in the bottle after it gets out.

And maybe I'm overly cautious, but I would not be feeding those free-range carpet-dwellers to my fish or herps.

 

[Midwater]

... I have geckos. Said geckos I feed mealworms ... out of the carpet

Where are you, that it is warm enough to have geckos, and cold enough to have carpet?

 

[troublesum]

I dont know about meal worms but the carpet beetles i would be very scared of my moving company works with a Fumigation company and bed bugs and carpet beetles are a big thing if you have carpet beetles i'm sorry my friend but you got some issues

 

[Hybridfish7]

I dont know about meal worms but the carpet beetles i would be very scared of my moving company works with a Fumigation company and bed bugs and carpet beetles are a big thing if you have carpet beetles i'm sorry my friend but you got some issues

(mealworms turn into beetles they are not the same as carpet beetles, which i have had at a past house)

 

[Hybridfish7]

Where are you, that it is warm enough to have geckos, and cold enough to have carpet?

middle of the atlantic coast zone 7 or something

 

[Hybridfish7]

Wow...I bet a nice growth of good old fashioned mould sounds pretty appealing right now, huh?

Crunchy carpet...regardless of what is causing the crunchiness...is pretty disgusting. Is there any possibility of peeling back the carpet entirely in that area to see what's going on under there? If there's an underpad, that will add to the PITA factor of the job, but simply prying off the quarter-round from the baseboard should allow you to pull the entire carpet away to do some snooping. It's going to take some furniture moving and isn't something you do on a whim, but I personally would really, really want to see the situation under there with my own two eyes.

Good luck with this. I used mealworms for many years back in the day, and never had a problem with them escaping and establishing themselves as a breeding colony. It sounds like you really need to re-do their housing to prevent escapes; they are really clumsy, terrible climbers, so it's not tough to keep them confined; a cover is needed as the adults can actually fly. But, as with many other infestations, it's much more difficult to put the genie back in the bottle after it gets out.

And maybe I'm overly cautious, but I would not be feeding those free-range carpet-dwellers to my fish or herps.

Just for your peace of mind the carpet itself isn't crunchy... They did the carpet in my room really poorly (it sticks up in some places) so it pretty much isn't actually attached to the subflooring. That space between the backing of the carpet and subflooring is where the crunching is. When I press down on the carpet I can feel crunching against the wood.

I feed escaped bugs to my fish all the time but NOTHING goes back into the gecko tanks without being rinsed under 140 degree water. As you know bugs cannot do this, so yknow... bugs don't go back in

From what I've read of people who've had a LOT more mealworms escape (dropping a few thousand strong colony on the floor), they die off when they run out of food. The slow life cycle also doesn't help. Thankfully it's almost winter so my room (having no functional climate control for some reason save for the air conditioner that we bought) will soon be somewhere in the range of 50 degrees. The only reason I still fear unknowns is because I don't know if the people dropping thousands also had the extra parameter of fish whose food also spilled on the floor. Obviously I vacuum my dropped food but clearly I've missed some. They did say the vacuum gets the worms out of the carpet though, so I'll be VERY thorough with that tomorrow.