Parasitic wasps are our friends

This is really cool. I've heard of this but never seen it. I caught a couple of tomato hornworms chomping on one of the Brandywine tomatoes tonight, but I left them alone. They've got bigger problems - all those tiny rice-shaped pods are the larvae of a parasitic wasp that will eat the hornworm for food. It is recommended to leave infested hornworms in the garden, as the hatched wasps go on to kill more hornworms. Go figure, I was practicing IPM (integrated pest management) and I didn't even realize it! Tomato hornworms pupate into sphinx moths; while I haven't seen any sphinxes around, we have had some unusual moths this year. I tried and failed to get a good picture of the hummingbird clearwing moth we had visiting our Stargazer lilies, but here's one from whatsthatbug.com. We also had some Monarch butterfly caterpillars take our bronze fennel down to the stems (should have taken a picture...). I let them do it, thinking we'ed get Monarchs flitting around before the summer was out. They were gone one morning, though. Either some critter had himself a feast, or they decided fennel wasn't their favorite chow after all.