“Stop by my shed and look down at the ground next to a yellow poplar leaf. Tell me what you see,” Jim called out to me as we passed each other, each carrying loads of small debris left from a recent storm.
“Not a snake, I hope,” I muttered to myself as I walked toward the shed.
No, it wasn’t a snake, but a large, plump, apple-green caterpillar with interesting black and white markings on its sides and pairs of prominent black-tipped red horns at the head end. It also bore tiny, horn-like, black spines at intervals across its back.
As I walked back toward Jim, I said, “It’s a tomato hornworm. You had better squish it and go check your tomatoes, but if you find one with little white projections on its back, don’t kill it. Those are the larvae of a braconid wasp and will kill the worm when they hatch.”
I continued working, but something was nagging at me, so I walked back to the shed and looked at the caterpillar again. I remembered that tomato hornworms and their tobacco-eating cousins d...