Ooh, I best be checking my pentas, MissSherry!

I think I'll have plenty of the tobacco and the tomato. How do you know for sure that they are manduca sextas? Do you know get the manduca quinquemaculatas in your area?

I only plant tomatoes for them. Maybe you could plant some extras next year just for these guys?

Susan

They truly are gorgeous cats, and gorgeous moths, too.

Here's a photo from last year of one of mine:

{{gwi:469992}}

Susan

Yes, they're big and beautiful, Susan! I figured these would be tobacco hornworms, because in the past the hornworms on my tomato plants had a red horn. I looked up tobacco and tomato hornworms on the Bill Oehlke site, and he says that tobacco hornworms usually lay their eggs on the undersides of leaves, only rarely the topsides. I went out to the garden and looked on the undersides of leaves and couldn't find any eggs there. He says that tomato hornworms/manducca quinquemaculatas lay their eggs on the topsides of the leaves, like mine, so that's probably what these are - he also said that m. quinquemaculatas are uncommon in the southeast and midwest, meaning that if these are tomato hornworms/m.q., then I'll be seeing a cat a little different from the ones I've seen before. While I was out there checking the tomato plants, I noticed a question mark flying all around my garden, and as I was walking off, I saw a pipevine swallowtail flying around some of my pipevines - I won't be surprised to find QM and PVS eggs! I also watched an AL laying eggs on still MORE cudweed!
Don't you love butterflying?
MissSherry

Yes, MissSherry, I do. I am going to try to post some photos of the 8 spotted foresters (I have so many of these cats!), and the tiny sphinx cats which will probably turn out to be EAs. It's very difficult to tell in the early instars, though, because they are not showing any of their markings yet. I'd love to see a Virginia Creeper sphinx or a pandora sphinx, too!

I hope you do find the QMs and PVS eggs! My hops is growing really fast. I wish my aristolochia would grow as fast as the hops does.

Susan

I don't know how long it takes tomato or tobacco hornworms to hatch, but it's gotta be more than one day, so the eggs have been there longer than I realized. I read that the hatchlings are white, and don't take on their green coloring until they start eating tomato leaves, which isn't long. Look how prominent the horn already is -
{{gwi:468939}}
MissSherry

To think I used to kill hornworms! :( I was vegetable gardening and not butterfly gardening and if something was after one of my plants, they had to go. This leaves me with a dilemma. I'm planting tomato plants this year because hubby loves tomatoes. Do they eat just the leaves or do they also eat the tomatoes? I don't think he'll take too kindly to his tomatoes being eaten up if that's what they do. I won't kill them though.
Cathy

If you just raise a couple, Cathy, they're not going to take over your plants. Do you also have some datura, nicotiana, anything else in the solonaceae family? They will move readily to another genus/species. I tried it last year with them, and they just kept on keepin on as though nothing happened.

Susan

Well, I got rid of the remaining eggs - I hated to do it, but I've worked too hard to have my entire tomato crop ruined. They'll take everything. I only have one small, spare tomato plant in a pot. I potted it up to a big pot with lots of chicken manure added to the potting soil to try to get maximum growth out of it. Tomorrow I'm going to cut off all the leaves that the hatchlings are on - and there're a lot of them out there - put them in water picks, put the water picks in a shady protected place, probably another cage, and by the time they've eaten all their leaves, I'll put them on the tomato plant, which will have been growing in the sun under optimum conditions. In the meantime, I'm going to look around for natural hosts, like the wild solanum that grows here and there around here. If that isn't enough, I'll guess I'll buy them some nicotiana - I'll be playing this by ear.
MissSherry

I love these guys......wish I had some!

Plant some datura seeds, too, MissSherry - they grow very fast this time of year.

They also eat browallias, calibrochoas, peppers, potato foliage, Shoo Fly plant (nicandra), salpiglossi, eggplant, and PETUNIAS.

Susan

Petunias? Well, I guess that means they're in the solanaceae family, Susan - I know they're even easier to find to buy than nicotiana.
The cats were hard to find today, because they've already turned pale green. Their horns are black - I don't know if they'll be that color permanently or change later on, but they're sure not red! Most of them were on the undersides of leaves. I found that the easiest way to find them is to turn over the leaves with a little hole in them - not all leaves with a little hole had a cat, but most did.
MissSherry

As I recall, the tobacco hornworms had red horns in early instars, so if yours are black, they are probably tomatoe hornworms.

Yes, Petunias are not only easy to find, but usually really cheap to buy, too.

Susan

I've been pleasantly surprised at how well the tomato leaves are holding up in water picks. I've had to refill the picks that are holding big leaves with water - they drink it up pretty fast, but at least they're not drooping and/or drying up! The 9 cats I found are growing very quickly. I'm always amazed at how fast tomato and/or tobacco hornworms grow - you look at your tomatoes one day, and they look fine, you look at them the next day, and half their leaves are stripped, and you find those BIG hornworms all over!
MissSherry

MissSherry,

I grow a few extra tomato plants that are far away from my eating tomatoes. Those are the plants I put my hornworms on. That way I can enjoy the cats, moths, and tomatoes.

This is one of my favorite all time photos. Took it last summer moving this guy to a tomato plant he could munch on.
clickable thumb

{{gwi:469990}}

randy

Great picture, Randy! Looks like it was a tobacco hornworm, what with the red horn - that's what I usually get, but it looks like I'm going to have some black-horned tomato hornworms this year.
MissSherry

MissSherry - last year when I raised the hornworms, the tomato cuttings I removed from the plant rooted in water! So, you can get extra plants that way, too! They root very quickly.

Susan

That'd be great - I could have a second planting of tomatoes!
I found several eggs on the undersides of tomato leaves this evening - they've all turned dark, so I imagine they'll hatch tomorrow. Maybe they're tobacco hornworms.
MissSherry

You should know fairly quickly, MissSherry, which one you have.

I checked my baby hornworms this morning and found that one had changed color after molting. I now have one brown caterpillar and 3 green! I still don't know if they are EAs or another sphinx type. I'm kind of hoping they are a different species. Not that I wouldn't raise them anyway, but I'd like to see some variation in usage of Virginia Creeper as a host in Oklahoma. So far, the markings are still not evident, so it is a waiting game.

I released another clearwing sphinx moth today. Only 1 left to go now. But, I should probably be seeing eggs again on the honeysuckle before long!

I was looking at Bill Oehlke's website again today and he has photos of one of the sphinx moths 1st instars which are white like yours were. What he said was really neat was to watch it eat foliage for the first time. He said you can literally WATCH the caterpillar turn green as they consume the green foliage. Cool!

Susan

Yes, I'm sure it is! By the time I looked at them again after they had initially hatched, they were to the light green stage.
Several of my hornworms have red horns, so some of the cats that I got from the undersides of the leaves came from eggs that were probably there. I'm glad I have both types.
There are usually two (or more) colors of moth cats - green and brown being the most common two, so who knows what yours are? It'll be fun for you to watch them grow and see what you get, Susan. :)
MissSherry

Even after cracking all those tomato plant hornworm eggs, I'm still finding more caterpillars on my plants, including a few that have been badly parasitized by whatever it is that makes those white things on their backs. They've gotten to some of my actual tomatoes, eating big chunks out of them. I've been cutting off the stems they're on, putting them in water picks and sticking them in the soil of the big container that had a tomato growing in it - it was going to be the plant I gave the hornworms, but it's just a skeleton of one now. Wagner says that tobacco hornworms have 7 diagonal lines and tomato hornworms have 8 with an extra horizontal line along the bottom making the diagonal lines look like sideways 'Vs' - mine all have 7 diagonal lines, no white line across the bottom, plus all their horns have turned red, so they must all be tobacco hornworms/manducca sexta. I'm just going to let them find their own place to tunnel underground - there's plenty of it out there! I've been feeding them the stems on my tomato plants that are in shady spots that will never flower and make tomatoes, like the lowermost leaves and others.

Several times people have asked how I got interested in butterflies and moths. After finding so many stripped tomato plant branches and tomatoes that had been bitten into, I remembered that it was actually tomato/tobacco hornworms that prompted me to really get into wildlife. It was all the beautiful butterflies I saw on this property when we first looked at it that really made me want to buy it. Then after we moved here, I enjoyed the butterflies, but didn't study them, much less raise any myself. I planted a garden each spring like I did when I lived in town - in town, I'd get an occasional hornworm, but they didn't do enough damage to worry about. After we moved here I'd hardly get any tomatoes at all because of the JILLIONS of huge hornworms that totally devoured my plants. The weeds grew more rampantly than they ever did in town, too. I finally decided that the only way I'd ever be able to grow tomatoes or other vegetables here was to use vast amounts of insecticides, which is something I didn't want to do - this has got to be one of the "buggiest" places in America! Since I couldn't lick 'em, I joined 'em! The grocery store has plenty of vegetables, I thought, so that's where I'd get them.
I made this picture of two of the tobacco hornworms - notice that one has dark lines and the other doesn't -
{{gwi:469996}}
MissSherry

If you are still offering them this year I would love to have all you want to send. I will change their diet so that they are non poisonous so they can be fed to my reptiles.

Thanks Cheryl

Here is a link that might be useful: Music City reptiles

I know this is an old thread, but I wanted to add that the white things on their backs are the eggs and cocoons of parasitic wasps, which are considered beneficial in the garden. I had never thought of hornworms of anything but pests until I was linked to this thread by someone on a gardening forum. I found at least a dozen of them on my tomatoes and while I didn't kill them, I did snip the branch they were on and throw it over the fence. I found one with the wasp cocoons too, as a matter of fact.

I think I'll plant extras next year for the hornworms :) I adore my butterfly garden and I can't believe I didn't think to check out what those hornworms became when they matured. Thank you for all of the great information!