However, the creature that emerged from the cricket doesn’t appear to be a horsehair worm (based on the reader’s description), and moreover the presence of a horsehair worm would be entirely disconnected from the gnat problem. Horsehair larvae target crickets to use them as hosts, killing them in the process. So, the dilemma is this: it sounds as if there is some connection between the dead cricket and the larva within it – i.e., the larva used the cricket as a host – and this would be perfectly explained if our reader found a horsehair larva. Why a single larva would be emerging from one cricket is strange. Also, when one finds maggots, they tend to be scattered around an area because of the prolific breeding habits of gnats and other flies. It is not that a dead cricket is an impossible place to find a gnat larva, but gnat larvae aren’t cricket parasites, so its presence in the cricket would be incidental. However, we don’t know why one gnat larva would be found emerging from a cricket in particular.

(Some people only use “maggot” to refer to the larval form of Brachyceran flies, like houseflies, but it can be used more generally to refer to any fly larva, and hence a gnat larva is a maggot, as gnats are flies.) Obviously, there are compelling reasons to think that gnat larvae might be around given the reader’s recent gnat problem. What may look like a short white maggot is a gnat larva, which is in fact a maggot, or the larval form of a fly. The thing about horsehair worms is that they have extremely notable body dimensions – they look like the hairs found on a horse’s tail, and thus do not resemble “some sort of short white maggot.”

When they are fully mature they will exit the insect’s body (as long as it is near some type of water source), a process that kills the host. (We have actually specifically written about crickets and horsehair worms before.) Hidden inside cysts in certain types of vegetation, small horsehair worm larvae are inadvertently ingested by insects, and then the worms slowly mature inside their hosts. Crickets, along with insects like grasshoppers and beetles, are one of the primary hosts for horsehair worms. The fact that the reader saw the creature crawling out of the cricket suggest he is finding a horsehair worm.

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