Which Moth Is It — Carpet, Clothes, or Neither?

Start with size

A Grain of Rice With Wings

A carpet or clothes moth has a body of six to eight millimetres and a wingspan of nine to sixteen. Put beside a five pence piece it is shorter than the coin is wide. If you could see it clearly from across the room, and your first instinct was to describe it as a moth rather than a small fluttering thing, it is almost certainly something else.

The moths that come in at a lit window on a summer evening are typically thirty to fifty millimetres across, stout bodied, and hold their wings like a tent or flat to the surface. They eat nectar or nothing. They will not touch a carpet, a jumper or anything else in the house, and killing them achieves nothing beyond a mark on the wall.

There is a scale drawing on the main carpet moth page with both insects at the same size, which settles it faster than any amount of description.

Then shape

Narrow, Fringed, Held Close

A textile moth is narrow. At rest the wings fold close along the body so the whole insect is a slim tube rather than a triangle, and the trailing edge of the wing carries a fringe of long hairs that is visible with a phone camera at close range.

Colour is less reliable than people expect. The common clothes moth is a plain straw gold with no markings at all. The case-bearing sort is buff with a few dark specks. Both look pale and slightly shiny. A moth with a strong pattern - bands, eye spots, mottling in several browns - is not one of these.

The head is the other tell, if you get a close look: textile moths have a tuft of upright hairs on the head that gives them a scruffy, brushed-forward look.

Then behaviour

It Runs. It Does Not Come to the Light

This one is the most useful in practice because you can test it without catching anything.

Disturb a clothes moth and its instinct is to run, drop into the pile or scuttle round the back of something. It flies in short, weak, fluttering hops at low level, usually near the floor or inside a wardrobe. It is not drawn to a lamp.

A garden moth does the opposite: it flies well, it flies upward, and it will circle a light for hours. If the moth you are looking at is orbiting a lampshade, it is not eating your carpet.

One more: textile moths turn up where the food is, so the honest test is location. Inside a wardrobe, at floor level near a skirting, in a dim spare room - suspicious. At a window, on the ceiling, near an outside door on a warm evening - almost certainly a visitor.

The other thing to look for

The Case, Which Is Easier to Find Than the Moth

The case-bearing species spends its whole larval life inside a small silk tube it drags around, and it camouflages that tube with fibres pulled out of whatever it is eating. On a beige carpet the cases are beige. On a dark red rug they are dark red.

They are four to ten millimetres long, tapered at both ends, and they look like a grain of rice lying in the pile - or, when they climb, a small smudge of carpet fluff stuck to a skirting board or the underside of a shelf.

Finding those is far better evidence than finding adults, because it tells you there is feeding going on right there, now. People usually find them once they know what they are looking at, which is the whole reason this article exists.

If you are still not sure

Keep It

Put it in a pot or a clear bag rather than squashing it. A photograph against something for scale - a coin, a fingertip, a ruler - is usually enough for us to tell you over the phone whether it matters.

There is no charge for that conversation, and a fair number of them end with us saying you have nothing to treat. We would rather do that than send somebody.

Short answers

Carpet Moth Questions

Going further

Carpet Moth Guides