Ever wonder where those little insects crawling   around your bathroom came  from?

Bad news: your drain.

With all that fluffy hair,  it looks like a tiny moth.

And some do call it a moth fly.

But a fly it is … a drain fly.

It’s called Clogmia – how appropriate.

It grew up over several weeks, out of sight,  among things you thought you’d washed away.

Drain flies sneak in from the outside,  through a crack in an old pipe, for example,   to sip some water they sensed with this  long mustache – their maxillary palps.

And here, on the plentiful gunk in  your pipes, they’ll grow a family.

Welcome, little one!

The larva  is the length of an eyelash.

That gunk it lives in?

Those are  bits of you: hair, saliva and food.

They make a nice meal for bacteria and fungi,   which form this dark, living  slime – called a biofilm.

This is what the larvae feed on.

It  also keeps them well moisturized.

If the larva ends up submerged, it  can still chow down.

It sweeps slime   particles out of the water with a  hairy mouthpart called the labrum, and rakes them in with its mandibles.

Underwater, it breathes with a bubble on its  backside that it collected at the surface.

This allows it to venture  through deep pools in your pipes.

When larvae, or the more grown-up pupae, like this  guy here, end up in a toilet bowl, it can be a   shock.

You might think the squigglers came out of  you.

Ew!

Don’t worry – they can’t live inside us.

And even though the drain flies in your bathroom  muck around in bacteria, they don’t really   spread it to humans.

They’re not interested in  landing on us.

Or even leaving the bathroom.

They’re in their happy place.

When you wash your  hands?

They protect themselves from the water   with their hairy wings.

Each hair has ridges  that trap air so the drops roll right off.

And if they’re caught off-guard by a  sudden surge, the flies skate across.

But they’re not invincible: When they get  trapped underwater long enough, they can drown.

If you find you really need to get rid of  them, drain cleaner helps, but it won’t   keep them away forever.

There’ll always be  some slime left behind, deep in your pipes,