Silverfish Control in Scarborough

Silverfish are the small, silver-grey, teardrop-shaped insects that wriggle out from behind baseboards, books, and bathroom tile when you flip a light on at night. They do not bite, sting, or carry disease, so they are harmless to your family. If you keep seeing house centipedes in the same basement, that is the same damp at work: centipedes move in to hunt the silverfish. What they eat is starch and cellulose: book pages, cardboard, wallpaper paste, stored photos, and cotton and linen, so a real infestation quietly grazes through whatever is boxed up in the basement. The honest fix is not a can of spray. Silverfish live where it is damp, and in a Scarborough basement the moisture has to come down before they leave for good. We treat the harbourage and point out the leak or humidity feeding them, because that is what ends it. Free inspection, same-day service, two-month guarantee.

(289) 806-3934

How to tell it is silverfish

Start with the insect itself: 12 to 19 millimetres long, silver or grey, carrot-shaped and tapering to the tail, with three bristles at the back end and two long antennae, moving in a fast side-to-side wriggle. You almost always see them at night in a bathroom or basement. When the bug is hiding, read the traces they leave behind:

• Pepper-like droppings, tiny dark specks that look like coarse ground pepper, on shelves, in drawers, and inside the cardboard boxes stacked in the basement.
• Yellow stains and small holes on paper, book pages, wallpaper, and stored clothing, usually with the surface scraped away rather than a clean hole punched through.
• Shed skins, thin see-through moults near their feeding spots, because silverfish keep moulting their whole lives.
• Grazed edges on book spines and the glued seams of boxes, where they feed on the starch in the paste.

Silverfish are a symptom of a moisture problem. The insect is what you notice; the damp basement is what is actually wrong. In a Birch Cliff bungalow with cartons of old paperwork on the floor, that stored paper has usually been feeding them for months before anyone spots the bug.

Where silverfish hide in Scarborough homes

Silverfish want the dampest, darkest, most paper-rich pockets of the house, and Scarborough's housing stock hands them all three. They press flat against a surface by day and feed at night, so you find them in:

• Basements: the unfinished basements of the postwar bungalows, back-splits, and side-splits across Birch Cliff, Cliffside, Wexford, and Bendale, where block and old brick hold damp and cardboard storage sits on a cool concrete floor.
• Homes near the water: the Bluffs and Guildwood, where properties backing onto the lake and the ravine slopes run humid and a foundation that wicks moisture keeps a basement damp all summer.
• Bathrooms: behind the toilet, under the vanity, and in the gap behind wall tile, wherever a fan is missing or unused and shower condensation never clears. This is the classic spot in the Kingston Road and Eglinton East apartment and walk-up stock.
• Kitchens: under the sink, behind the fridge, and in the pantry, where they get into flour, cereal, and pet food.
• Around plumbing: inside walls and along pipe runs, which is how they move between rooms and, in the older Eglinton East and Markham Road buildings, between stacked units.

The postwar Scarborough basement is prime silverfish ground: below grade, poorly ventilated, full of stored paper. The apartment version is a windowless bathroom with a dead or missing exhaust fan.

The honest fix: dry it out first

The one thing that ends a silverfish infestation is taking away the moisture they depend on. They need high humidity to survive and breed, so drop the relative humidity and they cannot hold on, whatever you spray. Alongside any treatment, this is the part that does the real work:

1. Run a dehumidifier in the basement and any damp room, holding relative humidity under about 50 percent. In a lot of Scarborough basements this one step breaks the infestation over a few weeks.
2. Fix the leaks. A dripping trap under the sink, a slow toilet, a damp foundation corner where the Bluffs-area grade pushes water at the wall. Silverfish gather where the water is.
3. Ventilate. Run the bathroom fan during and after showers. If a windowless apartment bathroom has no working fan, that is the fix, not a spray.
4. Cut the food and shelter. Get stored paper and cardboard off the basement floor into sealed bins, keep dry goods in sealed containers, and vacuum shelf edges and cracks to lift eggs and droppings.

How Insectica treats silverfish

We pair targeted product with the moisture plan above, because product without the moisture fix is a temporary result. On a Scarborough silverfish job we:

• Inspect for free to map where they are feeding and, more to the point, where the damp is coming from.
• Apply crack-and-crevice treatment with Health Canada PMRA-registered product placed straight into the harbourage: baseboard gaps, cracks around tile and plumbing, the backs of shelves, and wall voids.
• Hand you the moisture plan for your home: which room to dehumidify, which leak to fix, which storage to move, so the result holds after we leave.

Every product is PMRA-registered and used to the label. The work is carried out by Insectica Pest Control, owner-operated, not a franchise, run out of a Scarborough storefront, and there is no upsell. If the honest fix is a dehumidifier and a repaired trap under the sink, we say so.

The pests that follow the same damp

Silverfish share their humid, hidden habitat with the other moisture-loving pests, so finding one often means the conditions suit others too. The long-legged house centipede is the most common follow-on, because silverfish are its prey; our house centipede guide explains what that pairing means. If something faster and larger is showing up in the kitchen at night, read the cockroach control page; roaches want the same warm, damp cracks. Ants also track moisture indoors, and the ant control page covers those. For what any of this runs, the pest control cost page breaks it down by pest and home size.

Common questions

Reviewed August 2026.

(289) 806-3934