Mom Sees Bizarre Unknown Creatures on Kitchen Floor, Viral Video Has Experts Baffled

Illustration - Andrey_Popov/Shutterstock

From the archives: This story was last updated in June 2019.

In a divisive viral video that has left some people running for the hills and others reaching for the encyclopedia, a New Zealander filmed a handful of tiny wriggling unidentified creatures limping across his mom’s kitchen floor, and experts are confused, to say the least.

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Tim Clerke, from Auckland on New Zealand’s North Island, shared his scary find on Facebook for all to see. Some called it a “horror movie,” while others offered their opinions on the origin of the peculiar wriggling beasties.

“My mother found these on the kitchen floor this morning,” Clerke wrote. “One is still alive. Anyone know what they are?” The accompanying seconds-long video showed a closeup of a palm (presumably Clerke’s, unless his mom is a particularly brave woman!) holding four of the disconcerting round-bodied specimens. One of them visibly wiggles its leg or maybe tail-like appendage.

"My mother found these on the kitchen floor this morning," Clerke wrote Illustration - Andrey_Popov/Shutterstock

Members of his family would have “nightmares for weeks,” Clerke continued, pleading for suggestions. Well ask and you shall receive; the suggestions flooded in. “[It’s] like someone cut the bottom end off of baby mice,” came one colorful insight. “Those are miniature bats,” suggested another and slightly more believable perspective.

Other users threw some different ideas into the mix, and the growing buzz around Clerke’s video eventually roused the attention of animal experts. The Biosecurity New Zealand entomology team had a new idea; they suggested that the wriggling critters were the detached legs of a moth. “They suggest that something [possibly a cat] had just recently eaten the body of the moth,” the team told Yahoo News, “which may explain why a few of the legs were still twitching.”

Some social media users were convinced that the wriggling specimens were baby mice Illustration - praditkhorn somboonsa/Shutterstock

The insight sadly did nothing to assuage social media users’ collective apprehension. “That is like a horror movie,” one person wrote, echoing the sentiments of thousands. Another added: “I'd like to believe it was a hoax, then I could sleep better!”

To date, Clerke’s video has been viewed nearly 800,000 times, but the true identity of the animals is yet to be confirmed. According to The Daily Mail, experts from the University of Auckland had a sobering perspective; they claimed that the video was a hoax. Insect expert Eric Edwards, on the other hand, reinvigorated the video with its original horrific overtones by claiming that the unknown specimens could very well be “rat-tailed maggots.”

"I'd like to believe it was a hoax," a spooked reader shared, "then I could sleep better!" Illustration - Melinda Fawver/Shutterstock

It’s not the first time rat-tailed maggots have been found in that part of the world.

In early February of 2019, Australian backpacker Guy Shlomi found a rat-tailed maggot in Lake Bolac, in Victoria’s Western District, but he didn’t know it at the time. Like Clerke, he took to social media with video evidence to help identify the find. An entomologist later confirmed that Shlomi had found a hover-fly larvae, or “rat-tailed maggot” to cite its common name, a maggot with a “tube-like breathing siphon” at the end of its body.

Insect expert Eric Edwards claimed that the specimens could be "rat-tailed maggots" Illustration - Jen Eden/Shutterstock

Sounds like the stuff of horror movies, that’s for sure. As for Clerke, here’s hoping his mother’s mystery infestation has been successfully eradicated and that the nightmares are banished forever.