Rick Wile y, age 9, of Gale sburg, Ill., for his question:
What is a tomato worm?
A juicy tomato, as we all know, is very good to eat. Sad to say, a number of insects also know this. Very often, they get there ahead of us and set up housekeeping. When we go to pick the tomato, we find that a grub or wormy fellow has eaten a hole clear through the best part. This creature is actually an insect. He began life as an egg and will end up as a flying insect. The grub stage is merely one step in his life history.
One of the worst tomato worms is a criminal with a number of aliases. He is called the tomato fruit worm, the corn ear worm and the cotton boll worm. The little pest dines on tomatoes, corn ears or cotton bolls. This bandit is a greenish caterpillar. If you take a close up look at him through a magnifying glass, you may think you are looking at a creature more fierce than a tiger. In a way, this is true. He is one of the most bloodthirsty fighters in the world. If two of these fellows happen to live in the same tomato, they fight each other to the death. From our point of view this is not bad, for we never find more than one of the little monsters in any tomato, ear of corn or cotton boll.
The mother of this tomato pest is a rather drab little moth. She lays about one thousand eggs, spread around in various tomatoes, young ears of corn or cotton bolls. The eggs hatch into greedy green caterpillar larvaeand begin their work of destruction. When caterpillar days come to an end, the little creatures drop to the ground and turn into chrysalises which are pupae. The pupae hatch into more moths and the egg laying starts all over again.
The tomato hornworm is another caterpillar who feeds on our Juicy red tomatoes. He is a sizeable fat green caterpillar with what looks like a tail. This fellows mother is a large brown sphynx moth with a wide span of narrow wings. This caterpillar pest also feeds on tobacco and potato plants. Sometimes we find a tomato hornworm who will. lift up the front part of his body and rear back his head as though he means to attack. For this reason, some people think he is poisonous, but this 3s not so. He is merely a pest who feeds upon our crops. Like the tomato fruitworm, this fellow also spends his sleeping chrysalis days in the ground,
Still another tomato enemy is the corn borer, who will settle for a juicy tomato when he cannot got an ear of young corn. This little brown caterpillar bores right into the heart of the tomato or corn ear and weakens its growth. Its mother is a yellowish moth about one inch wide and her pupa stage is spent in the ground.
Most of these pests can be destroyed by mixing certain chemicals in the soil around the plants. This destroys the newly hatched caterpillars before they can crawl from the ground to the plants. Some gardeners wrap the base of their plants with paper to prevent the little bandits from climbing up to the fruit. Some spray the plants with chemicals and they all pick off the big tomato fruit worm when he appears near the fruit.