What Are Those Strange Red Worms At The Jersey Shore? Meet the Cinder Worms
If you’ve recently visited the beaches or back bays of Wildwood, New Jersey, and spotted thin, red, wiggling creatures swimming near the surface, you’re not alone.
What Are Those Strange Red Worms At The Jersey Shore
Over the weekend, mostly on Sunday, we had many people post in the Wildwoods groups and send us messages, about these long red worm looking bugs on the beaches in North Wildwood.
The photos you see are examples taken by Stacey Leon, Joan M Conn, Deb Lynn, Edward Rogers, and Camila Siegel , which show red worms with black heads.
These curious creatures are known as cinder worms and they make a brief appearance in our local waters every summer.
Cinder worms are a type of marine bristle worm, part of the polychaete family Nereididae, most commonly Nereis succinea.
They’re known for their reddish or orange coloring, slender segmented bodies, and bristle-like appendages along their sides.
When they swim, they create a fluttering, serpentine motion that often catches the eye of beachgoers.
Despite their appearance, cinder worms are completely harmless to humans.
They don’t bite or sting and pose no threat to swimmers. In fact, they play an important role in the marine ecosystem.
Each year, usually between late spring and mid-summer, cinder worms rise to the surface of the water during a spawning event.
These mass emergences are most noticeable on warm evenings with calm water and little wind.
The worms swim near the surface, release gametes, and then often break apart or die shortly after.
During this brief window, the water can seem filled with writhing red threads, a natural event that can look strange or even alarming to those unfamiliar with it.
In the case of this weekend, thousands of them came up to release gametes.
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Their arrival is a good sign for local anglers.
Striped bass and other game fish feed aggressively on cinder worms, making this one of the best times to fish near the marshes, inlets, or jetties. Some fly fishermen even use hand-tied “cinder worm” patterns to match the hatch.
Cinder worms are more commonly seen in southern estuaries like the Chesapeake Bay, but in recent years, their spawning events have become increasingly visible along the southern Jersey Shore, including the Wildwoods.
So next time you’re walking through the shallows and spot a red, swimming worm zipping past your toes, don’t panic.
It’s just one of nature’s more mysterious summer visitors doing its thing.
Watch closely and you might witness one of the ocean’s lesser-known spectacles happening right here in the Wildwoods.
Did you see these on the beach? Let us know!