Do silverfish eat paper, fabrics, or photos?

Silverfish digest polysaccharides — starch, cellulose, and dextrin — which is exactly what makes paper, wallpaper paste, and bookbinding glue attractive to them. Per UF/IFAS, silverfish are a documented pest of paper and library/museum collections precisely because of this starch-and-cellulose diet, not because they have any interest in the paper's fiber for its own sake. Wallpaper is a good example: the paste underneath is usually the real target, and the paper itself is collateral damage.

Starched fabric works the same way. Plain cotton, linen, or rayon left unstarched is far less attractive to silverfish than the same fabric with starch sizing in it — which is why old-fashioned starched collars and tablecloths show up in the damage reports more than everyday clothing does.

The "silverfish eat photos" claim is real for a specific reason: older silver-gelatin photographic prints have a gelatin (protein/starch-adjacent) emulsion layer that silverfish can graze, and older photo-album adhesives are often starch-based paste. That combination made pre-digital photo collections a genuine target.

Modern printed photos are a different material almost entirely — most consumer photo printing today does not use a gelatin emulsion, so the specific food source silverfish were exploiting isn't there in the same way. The claim isn't wrong historically; it's just being applied to a much smaller category of items than most readers assume when they hear "silverfish eat photos."

Silverfish scrape surfaces with chewing mouthparts rather than tunneling or boring, which is why the resulting damage looks like notched edges, small irregular holes, and shallow surface etching — not the item eaten through. That mechanism, combined with populations that build up slowly in sustained humidity, is why this is honestly a cosmetic, slow-developing problem rather than a sudden loss.

It's also worth being precise about the boundary: silverfish cannot chew wood framing, plastic, or the building itself. Nothing about their feeding mechanism reaches structure. If you're worried about a stored box of documents or an old wallpapered room, the actual ceiling of the problem is that specific box or that specific wall — not your house.

Silverfish need high relative humidity to develop — eggs and nymphs in particular require moist conditions — which is why they concentrate in bathrooms, basements, and laundry rooms. Finding silverfish is a genuinely useful signal that a space is too damp, more useful, honestly, than it is a signal that your keepsakes are already ruined.

That reframes the fix: dehumidifying the space does more to stop silverfish reproduction than any spot treatment, and it protects the paper and fabric stored there at the same time. The gray/long-tailed silverfish (Ctenolepisma longicaudatum) is a growing exception — it tolerates lower humidity and has been expanding indoors via central heating in Europe and North America — but the core fix is the same: dry the space, seal the storage.