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orange-striped oak worm

Kids Post: What is chewing the trees?

September 23, 2019

In fall we watch for tree leaves to turn pretty colors—but before they turn you may see that a lot of those leaves are being chewed up! What eats tree leaves?

Leaf chewers

Although many people call leaf chewers “worms,” most aren’t worms at all! They are the early stages—called larvae—of a variety of insects.

Caterpillars are larvae that grow up to be butterflies or moths. Although many caterpillars eat plants such as milkweeds or members of the carrot family—including parsley and dill—some prefer trees!

  • Inchworms (fall cankerworms) are fun to watch because they move by inching along, but they can do lots of leaf damage to many of our most popular trees, including maples, oaks, beeches, and hickories. The adults are gray moths; the males have wings, but the females are wingless!
  • Inchworm

    Fall cankerworm wingless female moth
  • Catalpa worms can eat most all the leaves off catalpa trees during the summer—they become sphinx moths!
  • Catalpa worm

    Catalpa worm damage
  • Orangestriped oakworms strip leaves from many types of oak trees as fall approaches—they become orange moths with a white spot on each wing.
  • Orange striped oakworm
  • Fall webworms are another moth caterpillar whose larvae eat the leaves of many trees— birches, cherries, crabapples, hickories, sourwoods, and walnuts—they live inside a web until they are ready to form a cocoon to become a fluffy white moth next spring.
  • Fall Webworm (Hyphantria cunea)_James Emery_CC BY 2.0_Flickr
    Fall webworms

Sawfly larvae grow up to be sawflies—they are small flying insects that lives such short lives that you may never see the adults—or mistake them for wasps if you do! The good news is they cannot sting. Their larvae can do a lot of damage to trees and shrubs, though. Dogwood sawfly larvae may “skeletonize” the leaves of many types of dogwoods, leaving just the leaf veins!

Dogwood sawfly larvae
Dogwood sawfly larvae damage

What can you do about leaf chewers?

Birds and predatory insects feed on these critters, helping manage the damage! Also, most of these leaf chewers do their eating late enough in the year that the trees will soon drop their leaves anyway, so most don’t suffer any serious harm.

  • Catalpa worms eat a bit earlier in the summer, though, and if you love to fish, you can help save tree leaves by collecting these chewers to use as bait!
  • You can stop fall webworm damage by disturbing the web—get an adult to help you cut off any of the webbed areas, use a stick to tear up the web, or use a strong stream of water from a garden hose to bust up the web!
  • Some years fall cankerworms can eat almost all the tree leaves, producing a lot of droppings— their swinging down on spiderweb-like strands bothers some people, too! You can ask an adult to help you trap the new female moths as they crawl up the trees later this fall, once the leaves have dropped and we’ve had a freeze. The City of Charlotte has instructions for how to make sticky band traps: https://charlottenc.gov/Engineering/LandscapeManagement/Trees/Documents/CankerwormBrochure2017.pdf#search=fall%20cankerworm

Article by Debbie Green, Extension Master GardenerSM Volunteer

 For More Information:

Inchworms (fall cankerworm):

https://content.ces.ncsu.edu/fall-cankerworm

Catalpa worms:

http://capitalnaturalist.blogspot.com/2015/07/catalpa-sphinx-moth-caterpillars.html

Orangestriped oakworms:

https://content.ces.ncsu.edu/orangestriped-oakworm

Fall webworms:

https://www.buncombemastergardener.org/tag/fall-webworms/

Dogwood sawfly:

https://hortnews.extension.iastate.edu/2009/8-12/sawfly.html

 

 

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Categories Gardening for Children Tags Catalpa Worm, children gardening, Dogwood Sawfly, Fall Cankerworm, insects, orange-striped oak worm

Orange-striped Oak Worm

August 18, 2015

 

Orange-striped Oak Worm
Orange-striped Oak Worm

Just when you think you’ve had enough with pests munching on your landscape …along comes one more!

I’m always surprised in August when I see the first Orange-striped Oak Worm. In my mind, they have become harbingers of cooler weather ahead.

Orange-striped Oak Worms have one generation per year. Adults (moths) emerge and lay clusters of yellow eggs on the bottom of oak leaves. Young caterpillars are yellow and feed gregariously, skeletonizing leaves, leaving most fine veins intact. As they grow, larvae become black with increasingly noticeable orange stripes. Large larvae can consume entire leaves, leaving only the mid-vein.

These caterpillars can partially or entirely defoliate trees, but often only one or two branches are affected. Later they’ll start crawling down trees to the ground looking for pupation sites in soil and leaf litter. By that time though, they are usually about done feeding for the year so treatment is not warranted.

NCSU’s Steve Franks, supplied this additional interesting tidbit about the Orange-striped Oak Worm:

“Mark Coffelt and Pete Schultz studied this critter at Virginia Tech in the 1990’s. They looked at the life cycle, damage, parasitoids, and developed a sampling plan, aesthetic injury level, and threshold for taking action to reduce further damage.

“The authors also used a survey with photographs of trees with 15, 25, 50, 75, or 100% defoliation. 70% of respondents were willing to accept some defoliation, and 42% responded that 25% defoliation was aesthetically acceptable. Moreover, Coffelt and Schultz found that 25% defoliation did not reduce root starch reserves which is a measure of tree vigor.”

Fellow gardeners reinforce my philosophy that one doesn’t have to reach for the sprayer every time a pest takes a bite out of one of our plants. Particularly if those plants are mature, well-established trees.

Article written by Glenn Palmer, Extension Master Gardener Volunteer.

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Categories Insect Pests, Trees Tags caterpillars, oak, orange-striped oak worm

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