Horse Hair Worms?

June 2, 1am, Scarborough, Ontario, Canada. It hadn't rained for 18 days and today it came down heavily finally. I had been overwatering actually as this is my first garden and it was very dry, so I had some plants falling over. After the rain stopped I felt the need to make sure all the shish kebab skewers I had used to help the plants weather the rain and severe wind were doing what they were meant to. Then I saw the worms, hundreds of them. Alien like, made my skin crawl until I researched horse hair worms. Is this them?

are they all falling from the sky?  are they all porn stars?

I suspect the amount of them has to do with the overwatering, hopefully its nature's way of correcting itself. Some leafy greens (pak choi, cabbage, ) are showing susceptibility to pests, hopefully the horse hair worms (if that's what they are) will parisitize the pests.

"Falling from the sky" Lol, if raindrops were spacecraft, indeed.

Hi BannerB. I too live in Ontario and have relatives who live in Scarborough, but I've never ever seen horsehair worms and neither have the relatives. So this is a new one on me.

They are indeed horsehair worms you have (according to a zoology text) but I can't even guess as to how or why you inherited so many. Perhaps you have fairly damp soil for some reason and this is their ideal breeding ground.

But the light at the end of the tunnel is that these worms are parasitic only to insects, never humans, and should be considered beneficial because they can be effective in controlling certain insects. They're nothing more than a curiosity. No control is necessary.

Thanks for the replies. I think it was the ridiculous amount of water I poured on (2-3 times daily) due to inexperience and the fact that it didn't rain for 18 days. My garden was likely one of the only places they could reproduce around here. When it finally rained it was heavy all day and they might have had to surface for oxygen. Lol, the creepy ones come out at night.