The Enemy of my Enemy is my Fiend: a tomato worm wasp

The way I see it there are two ways to imagine the horror of being eaten alive: something bigger than you eats you from the outside; or something smaller than you eats you from the inside. Given a choice, I’ll take the former. But if I were a vengeful personality, blinded with hatred for the worms who are devouring my tomatoes, I would wish for them the latter, a ghoulish week as zombies each hosting a hundred braconid wasp larvae; still alive, still eating just enough tomato leaf to stay alive. Until, fully nourished, the larvae burrow out and knit a lovely little forest of white cocoons attached to the worm’s green skin. Four days later, the sleek, tiny, elegant wasps emerge, all within the span of five minutes, and flutter their wings before taking to the air to mate and seek other worms in my tomato patch in which to lay their eggs.

You can find lots of horrific pictures of tomato worms catatonic beneath their burden of cocoons, and I was prepared to serve up one of those, knowing full well that it would produce nightmares among my more sensitive readers (I like to imagine that I might actually have some sensitive readers). However, I had been watching this particular worm for a couple of days, and on the fourth day was lucky enough to glance at the worm at the very moment the wasps were chewing off the caps of their cocoons and sliding out.

So it is the wasp, my little quarter-inch-long fiend, who is the real story here, my invisible conspirator in the endless war against the worms in my tomatoes. When the wasps find the worms, they lay eggs under the skin. When I find the worms, I clip off their heads with scissors. The wasps and I have different tastes. I leave some of the worms for them. And in the end, there are more tomatoes for me.

Sweet dreams.

Tagged as: braconid wasp, garden pests, tomato worm, tomatoes