As I was out tending to the plants in our garden this morning, I spotted this little guy tucked back in between some tomato leaves.
I was pretty sure I knew what the white baggage he carried on his back was, but I wanted to be 100% certain. Thanks to my friend, Google, I was able to quickly confirm my suspicion.
The caterpillar is called a tomato hornworm.
It's technically a pest, feeding on my tomato plants.
The white, rice-looking thingies are the eggs of a braconid wasp.
Basically, the wasp attaches its eggs to the hornworm. And when they hatch, the larvae burrow into the caterpillar and essentially eat it alive from the inside out.
That sounds like a horrible death to me!
So while I don't love finding hornworms in my garden, I couldn't sit idly by and allow that to happen.
The kids were a bit confused, being that it is an enemy of the garden. So I referenced the "love your enemies" scripture to explain why we were going to try to save it.
I was relieved that the eggs were relatively easy to detach from the soft flesh of the caterpillar. There were some tiny dots in the places where they'd been, but nothing too severe. I'm hopeful that it will make a full recovery. But heck, even if it doesn't, at least it won't be eaten alive!
As soon as the procedure was finished, it stretched out and began inching along the stem it had been clinging to.
As for the wasps, I felt a little bit bad about robbing them of their ability to thrive.
But I decided that the way they get ahead in life is barbaric and terrible. So I didn't feel that bad.
The kids had fun helping with the rescue effort and releasing it back into the garden with a new lease on life.
(We decided it had already been through enough, and therefore gave it a free pass to live out its days among our tomatoes.)
Welcome to the M family - interrupting nature one pest at a time!
:)
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