Florida is home to six families of earwigs, with three species showing up most often in yards and homes: the ring-legged earwig, the striped earwig, and the lined earwig. These flat-bodied insects are typically half an inch to an inch long, brown to black in color, and instantly recognizable by the pincer-like appendages (called cerci) extending from their rear end. They’re mostly harmless, though finding a cluster of them under a flowerpot or inside your garage can be unsettling.
Common Species in Florida
The ring-legged earwig is one of the most frequently encountered species statewide. It’s a smaller, darker earwig that lacks functional wings. The striped earwig is the largest of the three common species and is a strong flier, which means it’s the one most likely to show up at your porch light at night. The lined earwig is slimmer and often found on plants, where it feeds on small soft-bodied insects like aphids.
All three share the same basic body plan: a long, flattened shape built for squeezing into tight crevices, thread-like antennae with at least 10 segments, and short wings (when wings are present at all) that barely extend past the midsection. The pincers at the back are curved in males and straight in females. Earwigs use them for mating, fighting other earwigs, and grabbing small prey.
Where They Hide and How They Behave
Earwigs are nocturnal. During the day they tuck themselves into dark, moist spaces: under mulch, leaf litter, boards, stones, potted plants, and landscape timbers. Florida’s warm, humid climate is ideal for them year-round, so populations can build quickly in yards with heavy ground cover or poor drainage. At night they emerge to feed, and some species are strongly attracted to outdoor lighting, which is often how they end up on porches or near doorways.
When earwigs turn up inside a Florida home, it’s usually because they slipped through a gap under a door, a crack in a foundation, or an opening around a pipe. The good news: they don’t survive long indoors. There’s little for them to eat inside a house, so they tend to die off on their own if new ones can’t keep getting in.
What Earwigs Eat
Earwigs are omnivores. They feed on decaying plant material, soft fruit, flower petals, seedlings, and small insects. In a garden, this makes them a mixed bag. They can damage young vegetable plants and ripening fruit, especially stone fruits like peaches. But they also prey on aphids, mites, and insect eggs, which makes them genuinely useful as natural pest control in some situations. Whether they’re a help or a nuisance depends largely on what else is growing in your yard and how large the population gets.
Reproduction and Maternal Care
One of the more surprising things about earwigs is that mothers actively care for their eggs, which is unusual among insects. A female typically lays 15 to 70 eggs in a small chamber she digs in the soil. She then guards the clutch for the entire development period, which can range from 5 to 50 days depending on species and temperature. She regularly grooms the eggs with specialized mouthparts to prevent fungal growth, and she’ll aggressively defend the nest using her pincers and even chemical sprays.
After hatching, the young (called nymphs) look like smaller, paler versions of adults. They go through four to six molts before reaching full size, a process that takes anywhere from a few weeks to six months. In Florida’s warm climate, development tends to be faster, and some species can produce multiple generations per year.
Do Earwigs Bite or Cause Harm?
Earwigs are not venomous and rarely bite. What they do is pinch. If you pick one up or accidentally press against one, it may clamp down with its cerci as a defensive reflex. The pinch can be surprisingly firm, occasionally hard enough to break the skin or draw a small amount of blood, but most of the time it just leaves a red, slightly swollen mark that fades quickly.
The one thing to watch for is infection. Earwigs spend their lives in soil, drains, and decaying plant matter, so their pincers can carry bacteria. If a pinch does break your skin, clean the area with soap and water right away. Beyond that, earwigs pose no real health risk to people or pets.
As for the old myth that earwigs crawl into human ears to lay eggs or burrow into the brain: it’s completely false. An earwig could technically crawl into an ear the same way any small insect might, but they have no interest in doing so and cannot feed on or damage brain tissue.
Keeping Earwigs Out of Your Yard and Home
The most effective approach combines reducing moisture and eliminating hiding spots. Clear away leaf litter, boards, dense ground cover, and debris near your home’s foundation. Prune low-hanging branches and vines. If you’re irrigating your garden, drip irrigation is better than overhead watering because it keeps the soil surface drier.
Trapping works well for bringing outdoor populations down to manageable levels. Set traps near shrubbery, ground cover, or fences just before dark. A low-sided can filled with vegetable oil and a drop of bacon grease or fish oil makes an effective DIY trap. Rolled-up newspaper or short sections of garden hose also work: earwigs crawl inside overnight, and you shake them into soapy water the next morning. Daily trapping over a week or two can make a noticeable difference.
For fruit trees, a band of sticky material like Tanglefoot around the trunk prevents earwigs from climbing up to reach ripening fruit. Harvesting fruit as soon as it’s ripe and keeping trees properly pruned also helps.
If earwigs are getting inside your home, seal cracks around doors, windows, and utility pipes. Any earwigs already inside can simply be swept up or vacuumed. They won’t establish a colony indoors. For persistent outdoor infestations near the foundation, baits containing spinosad are among the most effective and environmentally sound options. Dampen the bait after applying it to soften it and make it more attractive, since earwigs are drawn to moisture.