Do earwigs damage garden plants or flowers?

European earwigs are nocturnal feeders with chewing mouthparts, and they use them on the softest tissue available: tender seedlings, flower petals, and the surface of ripening soft fruit like peaches and strawberries. The resulting damage looks like small, ragged holes rather than the neat consumption of a whole leaf, and it's most visible on plants that haven't yet hardened off — a young seedling shows the damage far more dramatically than an established perennial does.

Corn silk is a specific, sometimes-serious exception: earwig feeding on silk can interfere with pollination and reduce kernel set, which is a genuine yield concern for anyone growing corn at home. But even here, the effect is limited to the crop and the season, not a broader threat to the garden or the property.

UC IPM is direct about the scale: earwigs can devastate seedling vegetables or annual flowers and seriously damage maturing soft fruit or corn silks only at high population densities. That's an important qualifier — it takes an unusually large earwig population, typically in a damp year with plenty of harborage, to reach the level of damage the word 'devastate' implies. For an ordinary garden with a normal earwig presence, the damage tends to be a scattering of cosmetic holes that established, healthy plants shrug off entirely.

The folk myth that earwigs crawl into people's ears has no basis in fact and has likely done more to inflate their reputation as a menace than the actual feeding damage has.

The same UC IPM guidance that describes earwig feeding damage also notes that earwigs have been shown to be important predators of aphids and other soft-bodied pests. That's a genuinely two-sided relationship: the same earwig population nibbling your dahlia petals at night may also be reducing an aphid infestation on the same plant. Extension sources across multiple states — UMass, University of Connecticut, and Wisconsin Horticulture among them — consistently frame earwigs as a mixed-bag garden presence rather than a straightforward pest, and specifically warn against reflexively spraying for them because doing so removes a natural aphid check along with the earwigs.

Everything about earwig feeding damage is confined to plant tissue in the garden — leaves, petals, seedlings, soft fruit, corn silk. None of it touches your home's structure, wiring, plumbing, or any system a licensed pest control company treats. That's the honest boundary this hub draws throughout its yard-and-garden pages: a real horticultural nuisance is not the same thing as a property-damage problem, and dressing it up as one to justify a service call isn't honest.

The right resource for an earwig problem is UNH Cooperative Extension or a local garden center, who can advise on the specific plants affected and the timing that matters for your garden — not a pest control treatment plan.