Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh! Oh no
You should have left that horn worm alone! He’s carrying the cocoon of a parasitic wasp. The wasps were flying off with juvenile hornworms last week in my garden. I also stopped killing wasps, unless they’re in my deer stands.
that was my only guess, thanks for the link
“eventually adult wasps will emerge from the cocoons and the weakened hornworm will die”… I closed the loop a little quicker with my freezer, there were enough adult wasps that had already dropped their hosts like a bad habit by the looks of things under my embattled maters
i confuse the hell out of door to door pest control salesmen when i tell them that we like wasps, ants, and spiders at my house… most of them have no reply, they just leave me alone.
strange that a lot of people have a hard time seeing themselves as the most significant modifiers of the environment, we always want to have an enemy in something