Saturday, July 25, 2009

Serves you right!


Remember the lovely hornworms I told you about? I did some more research on them and found out that a type of wasp exists only to lay it's eggs in hornworms. Ecosystems are a funny world. I showed Dan a picture of what an 'infected' hormworm looks like in case he ever sees one. Well... sure enough... we have a hornworm sitting on one of our tomato plants with wasp cocoons just waiting to hatch. Serves him right for noshing on our tomatoes, if you ask me! Anyhoo, the research advised that if not infected, you need to get the worm off pronto, otherwise you provide an all day smorgasbord. However, if it IS infected to leave it alone. What?? Leave it alone? The website proceeded to say that the worm will be immobilized (therefore not doing any more damage to your plant) and you want the wasps to hatch, grow up and go lay eggs in another hornworm, immobilize it, and so on. Hmm... this is a good thing. Interesting. Now we watch for the cocoons to hatch. They haven't as of this morning. We'll keep watching!

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