Great Camouflage, Horn Worms

13 years ago

I can't believe how hard it is to find horn worms on tomato plants. They are huge, you'd think they'd be easy to find.

I know I've got them. I can recognize the damage they do, and days of searching carefully have only turned up 5 of the big fat gooey gross things.

If they wanted to strip the leaves, that would be one thing. But they want to chew damage into the fruit, too.

Yuck. I can barely force myself to touch them to pull them off the plant.

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Comments (11)

t-bird
13 years ago
Perhaps a mini version of a cattle prod is in order?
shoontok
13 years ago
LOL, yeah they are nasty buggers and do some significant damage. And yes many thousands of years of natural selection has given them some nice camo. Most of the time i dont spot them until i see clusters of white egg sack/pupae or whatever they are from those wasp creatures that parasite on them. Anyway by that time, the damage is done anyway.

When it comes to saving my plant, ill suck it up and pull them buggers off and let em take a swim in the manure/fert tea bucket :)

If they got the wasp infection ill let em be, cause they aint doing much damage at that point. And ill let those parasites grow to maturity so they can then infect the next generation of hornworms.
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I have mixed feelings about them. We love the sphinx moths they ultimately turn into, so I usually just try to move the big green cats to the daturas or to native nightshade plants in the pasture and hope they don't return to the tomato beds. If too many hornworms start to appear in the veggie garden at one time, I get rid of them, usually by snipping them in half with my garden scissors. (Since I don't like having their green ooze on the scissors, I then have to stop and go clean off the scissors.) I found one on my Jetstar tomato plant, which still has oodles of green tomatoes on it, on Saturday, so I picked that leaflet off the plant and took the leaf/hornworm to the #1 Rooster to see what he would do. (A caterpillar of any kind in the fenced chicken run is an occasion for lots of entertainment for the chickens....and for us.) I figured the #1 Rooster would eat it, but he didn't. Instead, he turned around and looked at his favorite hen, and she ran up and snatched it. We then had a wild chicken race for a couple of minutes as the other hens and the #2 and #3 roosters all chased #1 hen (a gorgeous Buff Orpington) and tried to take the worm from her. In the end, she ate the worm, no one ate the tomato leaf, and we had one happy hen and one proud Rooster. The rest of the poultry watched me rather anxiously for the remainder of my time outside, but I didn't find any cats to bring to them. It wasn't much, but such activity as we had in the chicken run passes for cheap entertainement out here in the sticks. It doesn't take much to entertain us on a quiet autumn afternoon. Dawn
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taz6122
13 years ago
Use scissors to snip them in half. I go out at night with a UV flashlight to snip them. The white lines light up pretty well with the UV light.
heather38
13 years ago
I was going to do a post on this as it is interesting but saw you post, I think tobacco and tomato horn worms are the same thing?

Here is a link that might be useful: how cool is this :)
vikingkirken
13 years ago
I can't bring myself to touch OR squish them, they're too gross! I scoop them off the leaves with my trowel and toss them in the street to be fried on the pavement or squashed by cars.
gardener_sandy
13 years ago
Tobacco hornworm has a series of white stripes on its side and has a red horn. Tomato hornworm has chevron shaped white markings on its side. It's horn is straighter and blue/black. Not a lot of difference, and no difference in how destructive they can be.

They both tend to feed on the interior of the plant during the heat of the day and are more easily spotted on the outer leaves near dawn and dusk.

My control method is to pick them off and scuff out a shallow place in the soil near the plant. I drop the critter in the hole, kick some dirt over it, and step on it. I figure it should give some fertilizer back to the plant it was eating. But those with the egg cases on their back get picked off and taken to another area of the garden so the predators can hatch out and help keep the hornowrm population down.

Sandy
rhizo_1 (North AL) zone 7
13 years ago
The tobacco and tomato hornworms are different species, same genus. Manduca sexta is the more common tobacco hornworm, clearly identifiable with their red horns (among other characteristics). Manduca quinquemaculata, with a very dark horn, is the tomato hornworm.
heather38
13 years ago
Did anyone read the article? plants secrete a sent which attracts the predator!
reyesuela
13 years ago
>Use scissors to snip them in half.

Ack! Ack! Ack!!!

I don't think I have the stomach for that.
rhizo_1 (North AL) zone 7
13 years ago
Yes, heather. Thanks for attaching that article. Green leaf volatiles have been studied for many years, on many different kinds of plants. Sometimes they attract predators to pests that may be feeding on a plant....at other times they attract pests in search of an injured plant to take advantage of.
hoodat
13 years ago
Good point. You may have noticed that when you touch a tomato plant you can smell it. The more you handle tomato plants the more of that scent they give off to attract the moth that lays the eggs.

Great Camouflage, Horn Worms

Comments (11)

t-bird

shoontok

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