Voracious Intruders
Dateline: Hollywood, Maine--There was a horrible intruder in my garden today. My wife and I have a vegetable garden about 12 feet square. Our tomatoes are doing very well this year—or so we thought. We were playing with a neighborhood cat near the garden when my wife noticed that some leaves on the tomato plants were gone. Eaten down to the stem. One plant was almost completely defoliated—and the green tomatos on the vine had even been chewed on.
We knew it couldn’t be the gophers we had trapped and repatriated to the countryside last summer. They would have started eating at the bottom of the plant, and eaten everything else in the garden beside. It didn’t look like a disease or a fungus. The leaves had been very neatly nipped off. We also noticed a lot of droppings under the plants that had been damaged.
My wife decided to call her dad. He grew up in the Bronx and lives in Queens, but he is a serious gardener. As soon as she described the damage to him, he said, “You’ve got something called horned caterpillar. Go look for it on the plants.” She asked what it looked like. “You know it when you see it. And call me back when you find one.”
After a few minutes of looking, I hear “Oh my god!” My wife calls me over to one of the plants and says she’s found one of the horned caterpillars. I don’t see it at first, but I keep looking at the end of the finger she’s pointing with, and finally it appears like a magic eye image. I realize she’s pointing at this finger-size thing on one of the stalks, perfectly camoflauged.
The horned caterpillar—specifically the tomato hornworm—is the Jabba the Hut of caterpillars. You have never seen a caterpillar like this monster. Full grown—having chowed down on our tomatoes for a few days, at least—it’s about as thick as your thumb. It’s the size of breakfast sausage.
The creature is actually kind of beautiful though. A pale green, it has five white stripes and a series of eye-like dots up the length of its body. I got the chance to see one of them eating: it was wrapped around a stalk of the tomato plant, its head and upper body leaning out over the leaf, and it methodically, and very quickly, chomped away in neat rows—imagine someone very intently eating a corn on the cob. I could see how these voracious eating machines could defoliate a plant in just a couple of days.
In an hour of searching, we eventually pulled ten of the beasts off our tomato plants. It was amazing, we took a lot of pictures, and I also realized how beautiful our sunflowers are.
We decided to get the hornworms off of our property, so we filled a grocery bag with weeds from the lawn and several of the half-eaten tomatoes they had gone to town on, and went for a walk. We took them to a field in the woods and left them with their groceries.
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We knew it couldn’t be the gophers we had trapped and repatriated to the countryside last summer. They would have started eating at the bottom of the plant, and eaten everything else in the garden beside. It didn’t look like a disease or a fungus. The leaves had been very neatly nipped off. We also noticed a lot of droppings under the plants that had been damaged.
My wife decided to call her dad. He grew up in the Bronx and lives in Queens, but he is a serious gardener. As soon as she described the damage to him, he said, “You’ve got something called horned caterpillar. Go look for it on the plants.” She asked what it looked like. “You know it when you see it. And call me back when you find one.”
After a few minutes of looking, I hear “Oh my god!” My wife calls me over to one of the plants and says she’s found one of the horned caterpillars. I don’t see it at first, but I keep looking at the end of the finger she’s pointing with, and finally it appears like a magic eye image. I realize she’s pointing at this finger-size thing on one of the stalks, perfectly camoflauged.
The horned caterpillar—specifically the tomato hornworm—is the Jabba the Hut of caterpillars. You have never seen a caterpillar like this monster. Full grown—having chowed down on our tomatoes for a few days, at least—it’s about as thick as your thumb. It’s the size of breakfast sausage.
The creature is actually kind of beautiful though. A pale green, it has five white stripes and a series of eye-like dots up the length of its body. I got the chance to see one of them eating: it was wrapped around a stalk of the tomato plant, its head and upper body leaning out over the leaf, and it methodically, and very quickly, chomped away in neat rows—imagine someone very intently eating a corn on the cob. I could see how these voracious eating machines could defoliate a plant in just a couple of days.
In an hour of searching, we eventually pulled ten of the beasts off our tomato plants. It was amazing, we took a lot of pictures, and I also realized how beautiful our sunflowers are.
We decided to get the hornworms off of our property, so we filled a grocery bag with weeds from the lawn and several of the half-eaten tomatoes they had gone to town on, and went for a walk. We took them to a field in the woods and left them with their groceries.
-30-
posted by Hallovian at 2:41 PM
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