What is it Wednesday archive: sometime in 2017?

What is it Wednesday

Can you identify what's in this photo?

 

 

Each Wednesday morning 

on Camp Lutherlyn's Facebook page

 the Lutherlyn Environmental Education Program posts a photo. 

 

 

Readers have all morning and afternoon 

to make their best guess about what the photo is. 

 

Around 6 pm LEEP provides the answer and a brief explanation.

 

 

Each week's What is it Wednesday post 

will also be posted on the Nature of Lutherlyn blog, 

 after it is posted on Facebook,

sometimes with additional bonus information. 

 

In addition to bringing you current editions of What is it Wednesday 

on the Nature of Lutherlyn blog, 

we will be reposting old editions,

creating a What is it Wednesday archive. 

 

This photo was posted as a What is it Wednesday

sometime in 2017 - probably August. 

 

 

 

And the answer is....

tomato hornworm with parasites

This is a tomato hornworm caterpillar, covered with parasitic wasp pupae! 

Tomato hornworms are a terrible garden pest that can grow to 4-5 inches long and decimate a tomato patch, leaving large round gouges in the tomatoes they have eaten. If you find a tomato hornworm in your garden, kill it! 

But if you find a tomato hornworm in your garden that has white ovals on its back, keep it. Those ovals are the pupae of a parasitic wasp which kills tomato hornworms. Keeping them helps the wasp population, which controls the tomato hornworm population. 

The wasp lays its eggs under the skin of the tomato hornworm. When the larvae hatch, they begin to eat the insides of the caterpillar. The protective case of the pupae stick out of the skin of the caterpillar, and those are the white ovals we see. By the time the wasps emerge as adults, the tomato hornworm is dead or near death. This means the tomato hornworm won't itself go through metamorphosis, become and adult moth, and lay eggs to create more tomato hornworms.  

Allowing the animals that naturally co-exist in your garden to help control your pests is a part of "integrated pest management", or IPM. IPM is an approach to controlling pests that uses as many natural controls as possible, and chemical pesticides as little as possible or not at all. This sometimes involves encouraging predators which will help control pests, by creating habitat for them in or near the garden. Sometimes all it takes is recognizing a beneficial insect (in this case, the parasitic wasp) and not killing it. 

Like and follow Camp Lutherlyn on Facebook, to see What is it Wednesday posts when they come out and have the opportunity to share your guesses in the comments!