Nature: Simultaneously Gross and Awesome
While picking tomatoes yesterday, we came across this: It's the biggest, grossest caterpillar we've ever seen! A quick google search of "big caterpillar with white things" showed us right away that this was a tomato hornworm , which is a pretty big garden pest that can defoliate your tomatoes in just a day or two. Ours doesn't seem to have done much more damage other than just eating the leaves of the branch it's currently on, and we couldn't find any more (although, according to the internet, they are notoriously hard to spot — they are pretty much the exact same color as the tomato leaves, for one thing). Kirk was about to pick it off the plant when I read a little further to find out what the white things are ... Parasitic Braconidae wasp larvae. So it turns out that those white things are miniature cocoons for wasp larvae. The eggs are laid when the wasp injects them into a hornworm, and as the larvae grow the EAT THEIR WAY OUT OF THE HO...