Photo used with permission of Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens, http://www.lewisginter.org/ Brian Vick, photographer.
This is a photo of the large, and dreaded, tomato hornworm, which sucks the lifeblood out of your tomatoes and eats their leaves. But wait, it is even more ghoulish yet! See the white things attached to the caterpillar? Those are the eggs of a parasitic wasp that will hatch, burrow into the hornworm and...read no more if you are squeamish... devour it from the inside out! A post-Halloween surprise indeed! If you see such a hornworm in your garden, leave it alone, so those fiendishly helpful wasps can grow into many many more wasps!
Happy (?) gardening!
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