Wildlife Spotting

I know this one REAL well. Unfortunately, from my garden. It's the tomato hornworm. And, boy can these puppies eat! 😒

Poor thing!

It's tough to say for sure. According to this site: http://entomology.ifas.ufl.edu/creatures/field/hornworm.htm, the tomato hornworm's horn tends to be black, and that's what this one has. I'd be more sure of the ID if we could see more of the stripes though, since the tobacco has diagonal ones and the tomato's make a sort of V shape.

Yeah, definitely a hornworm (you see see it at its posterior end), but who knows if it's a tomato hornworm or tobacco hornworm? You can see the diagonal stripes on its sides, so it could be the tobacco, but I haven't seen enough pictures of the tomato hornworm to distinguish the two just by that.

That's was my first impression also, Latimeria.

Do you have any more pictures of this? It looks like it might be a tobacco hornworm.

That poor caterpillar is heavily parasitzed with wasp eggs. Here's an interesting link on the subject: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2008/09/02/caterpillars-beware-parasitic-wasps-come-in-a-wide-variety/