How to hunt a tomato hornworm

One must be crazy to spend the morning searching through 600 tomato plants for the 4-5 inch long tomato hornworms that are so cryptically disguised in the foliage as to be nearly impossible to see. I call it hunting. First you must track the beasts, looking for defoliated plants and poop. If you find a defoliated plant, you check to see if the ends of the branches that have been munched are green or brown. If they're brown and dried over, then they are not fresh and the hornworm has most likely moved on. Similarly, if the poop is brown and dry, there is a good chance the hornworm is not in the vicinity any more. However, green branch tips and green poop means the quarry is nearby. Then begins the difficult task of locating the caterpillar.

They are the same color as the tomato plants, bright green, and have stripes and spots that blend in with the mottled sunlight filtering through the tomato leaves. I'm not sure what my trick is to spotting them. Sometimes I see the bright red "horn" on their back end. However, rather than looking for colors, I usually look for their shape: an oblong lump on the plant stem. They will sometimes rear up, making them easier to spot.

Once they are spotted comes the task of prying them off the tomato plant. The little beasties cling to the stems with great tenacity. I grab them from behind the head, as they will often projectile spit green goop while they make a furious click-scraping noise, their bodies wiggling and pulsating. Their defensive attempts are lost on me. Once I have them ripped from the plant, I survey the beauty of their stripes and eye-spots. They have distinctive spots running down their bodies that look like eyes, probably used to ward off predators. I've noticed that the largest, most distinct spot right behind their head has a wide variation in the color of the "iris". Some are blue, some red, some yellow, some black, some green. Do those with particular colors of eyespots have greater rates of survival than those with other colors?

After brief contemplation of such things, I throw the hornworm on the ground and smash it with my foot. It pop-snaps like a cherry tomato does in your mouth (sorry if I just ruined cherry tomatoes for you) and lime-green goo squirts out from beneath my shoe. Thus ends the life of another tomato-murdering hornworm.

-Shannon