Parasitic Wasps

At the end of last June i found this caterpillar on a dogwood tree next to my garden in Kentucky. It has some pretty good camouflage, and looks just like the twigs around it. That wasn't good enough to hide from a parasitic wasp. She laid her eggs in this caterpillar and it was being consumed from the inside. I guess that makes it hard to go about your business as a caterpillar. Instead of munching on leaves of the dogwood, it was almost completely stationary for several days on this twig.

Later, towards the end of October, as i cleaned up the garden i found several parasitized tomato hornworm caterpillars clinging to the dead tomato plants.

I found many more cocoons on the ground underneath these caterpillars. These caterpillars had their life cycle disrupted by the wasps. They didn't go on to eat more of my tomatoes plants or complete their metamorphosis and eventually lay more hornworm eggs on next years tomatoes.

By relying on nature's diversity to deal with pests, we welcomed these helpful wasps into our garden. If we had used some toxic poison to deal with the hornworms, it surely would have killed the wasps and who knows what else.