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Never in my whole life

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This is a newly hatched tomato horn worm. Lord knows I’ve seen hornworms, but I’ve never seen a freshly hatched one. It hasn’t even eaten enough to change color yet!

The small black egg is where it’s from. The cream colored egg has not yet hatched.

I can see the horn in the top two pictures but it’s probably more visible to (no offense) an untrained eye in the bottom one, though the length relative to body length is distorted by the perspective. The horn is actually on the rear end– so a bit of a misnomer.

WHOA!!

I put the leaf in a loosely seal Mason jar in a pot on the patio. I walked out to feed Tiger and caught the other egg hatching!

I took 40+ pics, some with a magnifying glass in front of the lens, and a couple videos. I don’t have time to sort through them right now but you will see the whole event!

My gosh. Tomorrow’s material is just writing itself.

They’ll both be dead by tomorrow and despite how adorably cute they are, if you have ever walked out to your tomato patch in the morning to see what damage these little dears can do when they’re 4″ of fat tomato hornworms, you will understand that I will not be shedding any tears.

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Aside. I of course notified The Girls of this via text along with a pic– THE OTHER ONE IS HATCHING!!!!!!– and here’s what Miss M said:

Video woman!

Film. What are you even doing?

We’re such geeks.

5 Responses

  1. Chickens _LOVE_ hornworms – if there’s any way to safely give them access to your tomato plant area…
    Actually…I don’t know if they’d harvest them themselves…but if you pick them off yourself, they really do enjoy them! I’d probably give them the chance to see if they’d clean them off the tomato plants if your set up was conducive to same.
    They are an amazing critter though. Terrible for the tomato plant, but incredible that they can eat as much as they do as fast as they do. And they are kind of pretty…but all said…daily inspections are a necessity if you have them!

    1. Daily inspections! Preach it. I give my plants a once over every day and I’ve learned to recognize the eggs– which solves a lot of problems. But every now and again one slips through all the way to the biggest size– where I have to use needle nosed pliers to pick it off!

  2. Question:
    The little eggs are black and white…do you have an opinion at the moment about the difference? Are they white until the worm hatches and then turn black? or is there some other (unknown) difference?
    Just wondering…!

    1. I video taped the hatching of the other one. When the larva is in they egg, the egg is white. I looks to me that the larva hatches back-end first and it eats whatever else is inside the egg on its way out and then when the egg shell is empty, it’s black. But that’s just my observation. May look into the life cycle and see what I discover.

  3. That makes sense…
    And it’s sort of a good thing…if you see them, you can get a count of how many are hatched and out there…EATING!!!

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