it is found in Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico.Ī stock image showing the predatory New Guinea flatworm. Inhabiting sub-tropical areas, in the U.S. Ganucheau told Click 2 Houston she thinks the worms arrived in her garden in plants that she bought from gardening stores to help her raise butterflies.Īs its name suggests, the worm originates from New Guinea, according to the TISI. There is no telling how many I have in my yard. "But then when you go to touch them they go flat they almost look like snot. "When they are crawling their nose points up like a snout-it's like an ant-eater snout," Ganucheau told the Houston Chronicle. Ganucheau told KHOU11: "I have kids and we're outside and we're swimming and we're barefooted, so I was like, 'Oh my goodness! Can we get this parasite from these worms?" Intrigued by the "strange looking" animals, Ganucheau contacted the Texas Invasive Species Institute (TISI) who told her they were New Guinea Flatworms. Ganucheau told CBS affiliate KHOU11 the worms are "slender, black, slimy." Neighbors as well as people from Houston and Copperfield have also seen the animals, she told Newsweek. The number of flatworms in her yard can add up to 20 in one hour, she said. Ganucheau asked herself: "what are these things? Can they hurt my kids or my dogs? What do they want in my yard?" "That's when I started to panic," she told Newsweek. So that's when I looked a little closer and ultimately got an icky feeling."Īt first she thought the creatures were leeches, but searching online suggested she had encountered a New Guinea Flatworm. "However the next evening I noticed several crawling on our brick patio deck. Ganucheau-who lives at home with her husband, three of their six children, and their dog Boscoe-said: "I showed my husband and we both kind of blew it off and we stepped on it.
while she was watering the plants on her porch in the Texan city of Pearland. Marranda Ganucheau, 39, told Newsweek she first spotted the flatworms around two weeks ago at about 10 p.m. A woman has warned fellow Texans to beware of predatory slimy, black worms that can carry parasites after she found them wriggling around on her porch.
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