#tobacco hornworm

[onenicebugperday]

do you have anything neat to share about tobacco hornworms? I got kinda mad at the ones that ate a bunch of my tomato plants' foliage.

They can certainly be destructive! But that's because caterpillars are designed to be eating machines. Gotta get very fat and happy before pupating into adults.

Tobacco hornworms have a special place in my heart since I raised several generations from egg to moth.

Tobacco hornworms are the larval stage of the Carolina sphinx moth, which is relatively large and very pretty!

Lorge. Photos by cassie169, nanofishology, and muir

They remind me a lot of death's head moths, which are some of my favorite species, and which tragically are not available to raise in the US.

In typical sphinx fashion, they feed from flowers and look like hummingbirds when flying, though this species is nocturnal so you likely won't see them flying around in the daytime.

Photo by kim_fleming

In the wild the caterpillars are green because of the yellow plant pigments they eat, but when you raise them in captivity on an artificial diet, they are bright blue, which is EXCELLENT.

Photos by sambiology and via bigappleherp

The caterpillars can make cute clicking noises to scare away predators. Adults can squeak! Or squirt you with a defensive fluid.

Idk if anyone else will think this is cute but their poop looks like little grenades:

Photo via southeasternoutdoors

Once the caterpillars are fat and happy enough, they burrow into the ground to pupate.

They may be destructive in gardens, but captive raised caterpillars are used in biomedical science labs for a whole bunch of different things (including neurobiology!) and of course they are hugely popular in the reptile pet trade as feeders.

Also.......they are precious and I love them :')

[deep-space-lines]

The Saga of Blunt

So my mom found this massive beautiful bastard (tobacco hornworm) on her tomato plants this morning and she doesn't want to release him because he will devour her tomatoes (fair enough) but I don't have the heart to kill him so uh... he's mine now. His legal name is Cigar but his friends call him Blunt. Everyone say hi to Blunt

He is already Very Very Large so I think he's only a few days away from pupating, in the meantime I shall do my best to care for him and feed him potatoes until he becomes a big beautiful moth. I will keep y'all posted on the saga of Blunt whether you like it or not

[gorjee-art]

Woke up to another silly man eating all our tomato leaves, threw him over another patch of pretty tasty leaves. Gonna be a beautiful moth one day.

[clannfearrunt]

The worm has moved to the bigger buffalo bur... very good at munching

[attacus-atlas-moth]

I raised 2 caterpillars--in the dark to see if it would affect their growth--for school. Since tobacco hornworms will stay in their pupal stage longer when raised with less light I hypothesized that they would grow slower than the rest of the classes caterpillars which were raised in the light.

This mostly seemed to be the case. My caterpillars molted slower than the rest of the class's did. One caterpillar is not enough to make any sort of conclusion about this, but it was intriguing. I'm curious if anyone has done similar things or knows studies on the topic.

Tobacco hornworm (Manduca sexta)

Painted lady (Vanessa cardui)

[punkgardener]

@thethingything hey here's the upclose picture of the apparent tobacco horn worms, tell me what you think

He's kinda crunched so if you need another picture let me know, beautiful eye spots though 😍

[monstera-tea]

Tobacco hornworm buddy I found at work :>

[zombeaversrule]

[bugswithcasey]

💚🐛Tobacco horned worms 🐛 💚

I’ve had these guys for five days now!! There starting to get big!!

[jenfoundabug]

Chonk with banana for scale

(Manduca sexta larvae almost ready to pupate)

[antletic]

tobacco hornworm larvae. if you google this guy youll see that all the pictures are green. this is because while the most common colour of insect blood is clear, these guys have blue blood. when feeding on leaves, they produce a yellow colour, blue + yellow = green. however this is a lab grown colony of hormworm, meaning theyre fed an artificial diet (not leaves), resulting in them looking blue!

these pictures are old (going thru the months worth of bug images i wanted to share lol), so i will pop in on the colony now as they are being fed a plant i believe. youll be able to see them kind of turning green

[onenicebugperday]

@izunafox53 submitted: I raise caterpillars in my spare time. I have tobacco hornworms and one sphinx moth caterpillar. The hornworms are named Beans, Rice, and Toast and the sphinx is Sausage. They'll be moths soon! :)

I love them all! Sausage is a very appropriate name. Look at how delightfully fat they are :)

Btw - "sphinx moth" is just the common name for any species in the family Sphingidae. Sausage looks like a pandorus sphinx as far as I can tell from what little I can see of their markings and their silly hood. Pandorus sphinxes also don't have a horn on their butt like most sphinxes do!

[bugsonthefarm]

Tobacco hornworm (Manduca sexta) (Hawkmoth/Sphynx Moth)

Sept 8 2022

Have I mentioned I love these guys? Seriously I adore them. I try to raise a caterpillar every year, and this is 2022′s lovely female adult! 

Native

[imabug]

Tobacco hornworm

Found a bunch of these big fat green caterpillars monching away on the jalapeno plants. Google image search identified them as tobacco hornworms (manduca sexta). Plucked about 6 of hornworms off the jalapeno plants (they have a pretty good grip for something so squishy) and flung them out into the road where at least 3 of them ended up getting squashed by passing traffic. The caterpillars…

[floweralleyblog-blog]

A Red Horn and Grenades

I plant ground cherries for my chipmunk, Stubby. He enjoys climbing the plant and picking his own snack. Stubby leaves the wrappers under the plant, so I know he has been there. Tobacco Hornworm has a red horn at rear I spied someone else snacking on the ground cherry this morning.A Tobacco Hornworm is devouring the delicate ends of the ground cherry limbs. The hornworm leaves his grenade-like…

[csolarstorm]

Today, on bugs I found:

HORNWORMS. THE BEST WORMS. You got tomatoes? You might have hornworms! They're the biggest, cutest, softest little foliage tubes to ever sport a little butt horn.

BEHOLD.

And there's a baby hornworm! Look at the little guy with his big ol' horn half the size of his body! What are you gonna do with that, little guy? Are you gonna scare some predators with that thing? Yes you are!

And there's more! It's the middle of summer and our backyard is teeming. Here's the katydid on the glass door. Might be missing a leg?

There be spiders next. But if you can get through the spiders, there's one more.

There's what seems to be an orb weaver in my petunias? Except she's not moving a lot, and she's clinging to this stem. I was able to pluck out a looper caterpillar that was right next to her, and she didn't react much.

The second one is next to the door, and Google is calling it a "false widow". It bites, but meh, its heart isn't in it like the "real" widows.

Lastly...the mantis in my fuschias stand tall! Mantis buddy has grown so much. They stand above many defeated spiders who are no longer a threat to their stature. Aphids flee in their presence. Prosper, mantis buddy! Protect the fuschias!