Bear with me, I'm new to gardening. When my youngest planted their first tomatoes, I began to ask questions of my gardening friends, which then led to looking up tomato and tobacco worms on the Internet. We are an insect-loving family (for the most part), which is why today was a big day. While watering and counting the tomatoes growing on each of our two potted plants, I discovered a lovely green guy (tobacco horn worm/manduca sexta) about 2+ centimeters (about an inch) long happily munching on a small tomato (pic below). I confess that I thought it was a tomato worm and had forgotten about the tobacco worm until I inadvertently re-discovered him online. Alas, the tomato worm would have had 8 v-shaped "stripes" along its body, while our Nibbles has 7 distinct white stripes, along with a red horn on his fanny, not a green one.
I don't need to tell you how fast the kiddos ran out of the house, screeching happily, to see our new friend. We watched our slow-moving muncher and then fairly patiently unloosed its sticky prolegs and put Nibbles into a temporary home (bug box) with the rest of the tomato he was eating as well as some leaves.
Now we will be raising tomatoes to eat and cute ferociously hungry caterpillars to watch metamorphose. Worst case scenario, the caterpillars will eat the tomatoes and we will metamorphose into ferociously hungry tomato-craving humans.
Toodles
p.s - Ignorance would have allowed me to think of a tomato "worm" as just that: a worm, except that my astute five-year-old pointed out rather matter-of-factly that Nibbles is a caterpillar (diagram below) because worms have no legs; prolegs or otherwise. Perhaps it is now obvious why he will be homeschooling me in the fall...
